Before I start, let me enclose that I’m the second person who gave Gutenberg 1 star nearly a year and a half ago… my rating is going to stay as 1 until Gutenberg becomes what it should be… a world class page builder.
Now let me get down to your questions:
– To select multiple blocks, click on the first block and while holding down the shift button go down the page and click the last block you want to select.
There are many very important points regarding Gutenberg…
– Unlike what they want you to believe Gutenberg is actually a page builder, they called it an editor so we won’t compare it to any of the available page builders, and compare it only to TinyMCE, which was a big mistake on their behalf.
– Now, every page builder works slightly differently, so it’s a matter of using Gutenberg for 2-3 days to get used to it. The interface and usability and the overall functionality of Gutenberg should have been much better before merging it to the core, could have been better, and certainly it will be better with time, as it is improving with every update. That said, the quality control of the product seems to be very low, and the developers are willing to sacrifice everything and anything to promote it. That said, looking at the amount of resources that is thrown towards it’s development, it is a matter of time that Gutenberg will be a first grade page builder – something that is not now, but it is slowly getting there.
Now here are the most important and technical reasons why Gutenberg is good.
– Compared to other page builders available for use in WordPress, Gutenberg will give you the best performance. Using Divi or WPBakery, etc… on shared hosting is like watching fresh paint slowly drying on a wall !
– The assets (CSS files, JS files, etc…) registered in each block do not get executed on a page, unless the block is used by that page, which is not the case with plugin and themes, all their assets do get executed on each page whether you have a need of those assets or not.
– Depending how well your theme is coded to make the backsite Gutenberg compatible, editing pages should look very similar what you would expect to see on the front end.
– And finally, and this is the most important thing, if you are using WordPress as an application, the site can finally be very scaleable. Let me explain:
Anyone can make a simple website. The real money making websites however are the ones that work as applications like Real Estate sites, and Classifieds sites, and Auto Dealer sites, just to mention a few. These sites use Custom Fields to hold the application data. Each custom field needs 2 rows of data in a table per post, which is not the case with Gutenberg. With Gutenberg everything gets stored in one row in the database table. Let me give you a specific example so you will see what I mean.
Let’s say we are setting a Real Estate site using a custom post type and using 50 custom fields to hold the specifics of each listing, and we have 5,000 properties listed: So in this case we will need 5,000 rows for the cpt, plus 5,000x50x2, which gives us a grand total of 505,000 rows of data, that’s over half a million btw…
Now instead of using Custom Fields we were to use Gutenberg, all we would need in this case would be just 5,000 records.
When doing advanced parametric queries (database searches), for example to find a house in Los Angeles, with at least 3 bedrooms and 2 baths, and a swimming pool, which case do you think the query result will show up faster? – searching things with 505,000 records or just 5,000 records…
And those are the points of Gutenberg – you asked, I answered – it’s nowhere perfect, but it gets better every day, and for large application type sites almost a must !!!
