So not ready

I finally installed the classic editor plugin but didn’t activate it for a few days. As expected nothing changed. I then activated it but left the block editor as the default. In fact I haven’t even used the classic editor yet. But serendipitously, many problems disappeared. The Events Calendar began behaving, for one. The venue dropdown is working and finding venues. I’m left wondering why this plugin is the equivalent of a pacemaker for the block editor’s heart.

Emboldened I installed Atomic Blocks and tried creating a new home page with two CTA buttons in a 2-column block. This is when I realized the block editor has weaponized my mouse left click button as each time I try to select one of the blocks a new paragraph block is created. It is useful to visit the page structure tool frequently to find and delete the sprinkling of empty paragraph blocks.

Then I decided I’d like to add a third column and CTA. And that’s when I found out I could not find a way to reorder the columns. I wanted the newest block to be in the center. I suppose I could try the code editor but I finally gave up on the idea when the CTA blocks were repeatedly infested with unrecoverable errors with this ominous message: “This block contains unexpected or invalid content” and which gave me the option to resolve (can’t find what that means in the user documentation) or Convert to HTML. The result regardless of what is selected is always to create an HTML scramble where the CTA block was that destroys the reason to use blocks, and once this transform takes place it is like vinyl siding – it is final. Then the hunt is on to delete the CTA blocks and the column block and start over (approaching tenth iteration) while recalling Einstein’s definition of madness. The column block is used for the sole reason that individual block such as the CTA cannot be placed side by side by mere mortals. This mere mortal has yet to figure out what the AB container block does and how it works. It is the will-o’-the-wisp of the block world and a frequent target of my newly weaponized mouse paragraph block launcher. These are some of the surprising user experiences I mentioned in the previous post.

If I could have one wish it would be to replace paragraph blocks with/or create a nestable flow block that accepts coherent streams of text paragraphs ala PageMaker, Interleaf, and FrameMaker. A flow block would provide options for the text in the flow in one divine click rather than stalking independent paragraphs like a stoat chasing voles. It would have to allow nesting to permit inserting images, tables, css, etc., and maybe even JS snippets whose scope is the current flow block.

We survived the upgrade here to 5.0.2 and all is as well as it was at 4.9.9 except at 4.9.9 I was a bit of a WordPress expert and in many things WP to the benefit of my customers I still have, a consultable guru. I now feel like a crank-addled Pomeranian digging for long-forgotten bones in an endless field of broken glass. The promise of performance improvement is realized in that I am able to hit a wall faster than before. I cede that as a plus for promise-keeping.

Here is where I am, today. WordPress is not now the tool I would have chosen a decade+ ago for the solution to simple needs to communicate or pontificate, and the foundation upon which to offer my hosting services to alike-minded customers. And I get the feeling we are all now WordPress Deplorables caught in the wrong communications basket.

If I were ever to have wished to seek the difficult path I’d have stayed with Adobe’s Nightmare Weaver. But now here I am, a new pup in the litter of crank-addled Pomeranians trying to make a buck and to keep my customers my customers. No hard feelings… I guess.

I’ve just had an epiphany and please forgive me my sharing it, fresh and unvetted. This forum at which we are all gathered is not block oriented. Were that to happen on the occasion of the morning’s dawn heads would roll by lunch, don’t you think?

I do and I think more, that by choice we’d not be at this awkward place had the PTB (Powers that be) asked us.

Maybe it is time to give REST a rest. It is the evil protocol arbiter behind all this pretend stateless statefulness we’re fighting in browserland and perhaps the IOS app is the final frontier for the internet universal client started by NCSA’s Mosaic so many years ago (and I go back even farther to the Gopher) and Gutenberg is it’s last gasp.

Anyway, back to the great learning experience that is Gutenberg.

• This reply was modified 6 years, 3 months ago by dpevents.
• This reply was modified 6 years, 3 months ago by Jan Dembowski.

Agreed. This should have been implemented as an optional plugin for a major version or two. Totally unacceptable. People should be removed from the project.

I’ve found a solution to the scrolling problem I have been having and it turns out to be a problem with the Slider by 10Web when scrolling a long document. With the plugin activated I cannot scroll from the top to the bottom of these multi-screen documents unless I also also use the sidebar scroll bar. And when the sidebar is hidden there are two scrollbar thumbs in the scrollbar and they are interactive. Neither will scroll the entire document but by using both thumbs it is possible to get from the top to the bottom. This is the same if I use the scroll wheel on the mouse or drag the thumbs with the mouse. Problem disappears when the plugin is deactivated. If interested I’ll make a video. They don’t accept input here from users of the free version but I thought it interesting enough to share. My first impression was this was normal for the block editor but after watching other people’s videos I realized it was a local problem quickly isolated by disabling/re-enabling plugins.

I’m not happy with it as is but I’m committed to Gutenberg because it appeals to my sense of order and my publishing history. I grew up with the Chicago Manual of Style and Gutenberg is on a track that, as built, will never converge. Case in point being the necessity for the Advanced Rich Text Tools for Gutenberg plugin. This functionality belongs in core. But plugins like this bring the parallel tracks closer together. Some of the frustration is HTML5 which is the controlling environment that limits what a CMS can provide.

A great frustration turns out to be Gutenberg’s stammering AI approach to interpreting input. There is such a significant gap between what is typed in and what is pasted in that I fear for those who are composing the user guide. By example, and hardly the only possible example, you do not get the same results from typing in a bulleted list as you do when you paste in a bulleted list and some of that is dependent upon the source you are copying into your paste buffer. And what Gutenberg does with that content is often bewildering.

Here is a puzzling thing. Say you have just copied text into the clipboard from an application and you want to paste it into the Gutenberg editor. In any other editor you drop it into where ever the cursor is. Oft times (in other editing tools) you hit the enter key to create a new blank line. In Gutenberg that creates a new blank paragraph block. The problem is Gutenberg will accept your pasted text into that block but then it immediately begins to guess what kind of text it is. And it guesses badly.

I work a lot with preformatted text that uses mono-spaced fonts and in HTML would be considered to exist between preformatted HTML tags. Gutenberg will accept one line of that, convert the current block from paragraph to preformatted text and then from the second line to the end of the past buffer it will create a new paragraph block out of thin air and drop the remainder of the paste buffer into it. This is unexpected and very different from classic WordPress, and out of my experience after many decades of computerized publishing.

I’m an early adopter of Unix many decades ago and grew up on vi, ed, and LaTeX. I’m used to abstract formatting of text. WYSIWYG was years in the future and we had work to do and documents to write. But it was predictable and Gutenberg is not. That isn’t to say it is not repeatable, but I don’t yet understand the rule set so can’t predict what will happen. That will come. But going into Gutenberg is not the logical and rewarding experience that going from LaTeX to Aldus Pagemaker was. And I miss that near perfect WYSIWYG experience and don’t see how Gutenberg can ever achieve that or if that is even a goal for the developer team. The current “official” blocks are few and too granular hence the need for Advanced Rich Text Tools for Gutenberg plugins and their ilk.

I’m going to be documenting my Gutenberg growth on my sandbox server because while I’m unhappy at Gutenberg V. 1.0, it seems to be the future of the CMS and I’m in it to win it. The good news is that at age 73 I don’t have many tormented years left to own this thing.

And because these fora are currently filled with angry birds I’ll forego commenting further and learn passively from the success stories of others.

‘K – I give. Gutenberg in the current state cannot be urged to work effectively. It isn’t a matter of not understanding the beast – I do, but it is simply not ready and it cannot do essential things, it has rendering problems both in the editor and in the delivered pages and posts. I tried hard but it didn’t and it’s time to accept that and move on. Initially I will revert to the Classic Editor, disable blocks in the Events Calendar, and set up a B2Evolution virtual server. I wish it had been more fun and that I hadn’t wasted so much time trying to get it to do what it obviously cannot.