Please leave a way to turn Gutenberg off

Hiya, thank you for taking the time to leave a review.

There is a way to turn it off, we offer a plugin called Classic Editor for that, we would of course prefer it if as many as possible used the new editing experience.

Would you mind sharing why you’d like to use the old editor, and what you found un-intuitive with the new experience?

I am not that guy, but I just got the plugin to finally work, after a few attempts. I’d check and it’d break and then I’d tell myself to come back after a few months and try again, so kudos on the progress.

This may seem like a small thing, but I am trying to think of the standpoint of one of my clients rather than as myself, who knows how to do stuff in a few different ways.

There are a lot of page builders that direct people. Tutorials help, so I won’t pretend like some of them don’t need some instruction, but in at least one, when there’s a blank page, there’s a big button that says “Add New Section.” It’s brightly colored and the only thing in the display of the page. It’s obvious what I have to do to get started.

Granted, on here, there is “Add Title” and “Write Story,” but I have precisely zero clients with just a blog. Half of them don’t have one, and this comes up for me when I make new pages. Seems like a small thing, because common sense would say that anything could go in there and it doesn’t have to be an actual story, but in my experience even the brightest people are their dumbest selves online.

The people I know are some of the best in the region or even their industry, and I know some of them will say, “Story? I don’t want to write a story here, I just want to talk about my product or service.”

Not only that, but far more practically, I can’t seem to get rid of a title. Soooo many people don’t want a title on their pages, even after they’re informed that it can be detrimental to SEO.

Perhaps my biggest concern, though, for UX, is the teeny tiny (+) button to add new blocks. Sure, if I do it once I know where to go, but it is very small and has the same “weight” visually as buttons that do other less important and very different things. Why not make it a focal point if it’s something I will click a bunch of times when setting things up? If my vision was a hair worse I’d think it was a close button in the wrong spot.

I don’t know if it’s intentional, but I have a (seemingly auto-generated) max-width on the editor container which smooshes all my content into a middle area. 636 out of a 1920 screen, but more accurately about half of all usable space in the editor. That’s not representative of my theme at all. The classic editor isn’t either, because it also is on the back end, but it’s way closer and therefore more representative.

One of the thing people seem to like about “building blocks” and page building systems is the ability to easily do, visually, what you can’t easily without knowing HTML, doing things side by side on the same row, for example. Not only is it not clear how to do this (for two images that are small enough…I got it to align next to some text okay), but in my attempts at experimentation I wound up making something that looked broken (though it isn’t).

I saw that there was an undo, but it toggled back and forth, instead of back more than one step, and to a state that had never actually existed (no console errors, so I am not sure what it thinks happened. There are only three or four elements). Contrast that to a page builder with not only more undos, but a whole list where you can see it all live when you click them. I’m sure there are memory/database concerns (or maybe this is a planned feature), but in my experience people don’t give a hoot about how a thing gets done, even if there are consequences, just that they get what they want.

I don’t even know what’s possible, playing around with this, and I’d used WordPress for eight years. I feel like very little is, or that at least my options are super limited. I hate to sound overly dramatic, but I actually felt a little stressed, like a chest-tightening, thinking I was being restrained somehow. In contrast, my favorite page builder is so out of the way of the process of creation that I feel like it “falls away” and lets me just come to build my content unobstructed. That’s supposed to be the whole point, I think. “Come to WordPress, where you can just pop in and make stuff and pop out.”

I see guys that do custom web work around me and they poo on WordPress saying that it’s “just one more thing to learn” and that it has a huge learning curve, and I used to defend them saying that was not the case, that anything you needed to know could be mastered in a couple passes. That most of the issues people ran into were from people buying themes from market sites that were one-size-fits all and a lot of bloat that didn’t ride piggyback on the actual existing good parts of WordPress and tried to do their own thing unnecessarily. That actual WordPress, on its own, all the stuff you really need, is fine, and that their criticisms were about something else, not WordPress.

I am actually far less concerned about things like plugin compatibility, even though I am a dev, than I am about WordPress itself being “out of the way.” I get moving away from something like the classic editor when people had to find their own solutions (like page builders) to stay happy.

So I see the overall intent, and some of the vision, but I am going to need to play with it more and make attempts at generating specific layouts before I do an actual review. I have support tickets to issue first (I tried previewing an existing page after seeing it condense everything I’d written before into a single goofy column (which is fair, it was probably hard for it to convert it to blocks, if it tried), but then I got a 500 error the very next moment and I can’t access my site.

My folks raised me to say something nice after criticism, even if it’s meant constructively, so I will say that showing options for blocks on the sidebar (where the page templates and publish button go) is pretty nice, versus having pop-ups obscuring things like before. Makes it feel kiosky. Oh, and it is really fast.

Thanks for your time and patience. For all of our sakes, I wish you the best of fortunes. Thank you for still allowing the old editor for the time being and for working with so many developers to make sure all our other tools don’t break when release happens =)

I am wondering what will happen to Advanced Custom Fields (ACF) in relation to Gutenberg.
The ACF plugin has a way to turn off certain default fields in the Post Editor, which is very handy if you want to customize the editor for your user, or if you want to use WordPress to have your data in specific fields.

For example, I want to override the default “content” editor, and use a set of custom fields instead of that. In my initial test with ACF and the Gutenberg plugin, when I deactivated the default content editor, it did not disappear while the Gutenberg plugin was active. When I removed Gutenberg then the content editor disappeared as expected.

Any incompatibilities with Gutenberg and other plugins should be brought up to the developers of those plugins to ensure that they have a fix in place by the time Gutenberg becomes a part of core.

In this case, ACF’s support can be reached at https://support.advancedcustomfields.com/