The future is bright with Gutenberg – well done

  • Steve

    (@steveholland)


    5 years, 11 months ago

    Amazed to see so many negative reviews. I note that they are all generally very emotional and fail to articulate genuine concerns or provide constructive feedback. How disappointing.

    I really like the new Gutenberg editor. I can really see the immediate benefits in the initial rollout and I can see the potential as well.

    As someone who regularly trains “average users” in content management using WordPress, my first impression is excellent. Watching a rookie use the Gutenberg editor on first attempt they seem to get the hang of it so much faster than the old editor. The blocks seem natural to them, drag and drop features are great, being able to re-arrange blocks and add new blocks in between blocks etc. makes the end user feel they are really in control of the layout. The clean and responsive interface is great and it’s very user-friendly and a lot of it is self-explanatory.

    New users seem to get the hang of Gutenberg quite quickly just being hovering their cursor around the icons. Watching new users try to get their head around the old editor was at times exhausting! I felt their pain and tried to remind myself that unlike me, they can’t just switch to the HTML tab – it’s a foreign language.

    I think too many of the complaints about Gutenberg forget that it’s not a website builder for developers to manage theme styles/design/layouts. It’s a content editor for managing articles and page content.

    Combining the new Gutenberg editor with a website builder like Elementor has been very successful. It’s the best of both worlds – initial template (header and footer) and style/design management with Elementor and daily/regular content management and post writing with Gutenberg.

    I’m really looking forward to Phase II of Gutenberg with “navigation” blocks and renaming the widget section “Sidebars” as it should have always been. That way we can finally do away with the confusing terms “widget” and “menu”. No more widgets, just different types of flexible blocks!

    Well done!

Viewing 11 replies - 1 through 11 (of 11 total)

  • Well done? Ok, try it for yourself. Very easy task: 2-column-layout with a text block on the left side and an image block on the right. Easy, isnt’t? Well, besides the suprising fact that there is no image block available for such a layout. So, I have to use an HTML block to put my image into it. That’s really not an option for an average user. Do I miss anything? Please, show me the way. I really needed that for two sites. Not for me, I can do that in HTML. But for the customers who would like to edit the content.

    Thread Starter Steve

    (@steveholland)

    That’s super easy @cutu234 using the column block

    This took me about 30 seconds: https://screenshots.firefox.com/FuomhV0AAa2SpY0B/www.prefix.com.au

    If you want more advance control over columns and rows you could even try one of the many block plugins that are already available, such as: https://www.ads-software.com/plugins/kadence-blocks/

    • This reply was modified 5 years, 11 months ago by Steve. Reason: Added plugin suggestion

    Nice, but how? I create a 2-column-block. Both blocks inside are text blocks. Probably, I’m too dumb, but I cannot insert an image into this text block. I CAN insert a new image block before the text block and then delete the unused block. However, I wouldn’t consider this best practice. Is there a better way? Please, advise!

    Having said this, as a experienced user and developer with more than 10 years experience, it is a joke that I even have to ask this question, isn’t it?

    @cutu234

    PMFBI

    Place a Columns block, write your text on the left column, click on the right column (or press TAB until you arrive on the right place), on the empty block press / (that’s a shortcut for insert block), type “img” (without double quotes), upload to or select image from library, voilá.

    Hope it helps.

    Excellent, my friend! You did help indeed. If I could, I would rate you 5 stars. While I am excited that this works, I am totally shocked that I need help for this totally trivial task. This is ridiculous, isn’t it? Anyway, thanks a lot. Great shortcut.

    • This reply was modified 5 years, 11 months ago by cutu234.
    Moderator Marius L. J.

    (@clorith)

    Hiya,

    There’s also a block called Media & Text which provides exactly this, image on one side, text on the other, which is really handy ??

    Great, this is even better. Thank you very much! I don’t like Gutenberg at all. But I’m positively surprised for the first time. However, why are these functions hidden so deeply? I mean, image + text is probably one of the most important elements, isn’t. But it’s there.

    Thread Starter Steve

    (@steveholland)

    @cutu234 it’s not hidden you can scroll through the entire list of blocks when you click the add block button.

    I think a lot of people seem to have had a really emotional reaction to the new editor, rather than sitting down with a sandwich and a cup of coffee and actually assessed the situation.

    If people just tried it for 5 minutes without panicking or complaining I’m sure it would be fine.

    It’s not hidden you can scroll through the entire list of blocks when you click the add block button.

    That’s only half the story. If you have never used the media+text block, it does not appear in the top “most used” list. I had to find it in the “layout elements” block list.

    If people just tried it for 5 minutes without panicking or complaining I’m sure it would be fine.

    5 minutes is the underestimation of the year, isn’t it? But I agree that Gutenberg is probably better than the first impressions suggest.

    @clorith I tried this block as you suggested and there was no way to edit the size to make it the actual size I cropped it to before uploading, it came out HUGE and there was no option to set it to the actual (true) size. Yes, I tried to set the size to the right, but when I previewed the page that image came out absolutely so huge it took up the entire area of my computer monitor.

    No constructive feedback? I, as well as many others, did post a good well documented test, detailed usecases (I’ve been a software tester for many years!). Zero response to that .. I’ve tested it over and over again and published my results on this support page as well as in a lengthy one hour video hoping it would help the developers see what was going wrong. To no avail.

    Many have posted constructive feedback as well as filed bug reports. So far, it seems the developers were not really willing to listen or not capable fixing the issues and it has been shoved trough our throats. Well, people get emotional and angry. I’d say for more than one good reason.

    After the official release, I did install it on two websites. It was crashing one of them, the other was very slow and editing a piece a pain in the b*t. So I installed Disable Gutenberg. On some others I’ve installed the WordPress fork.

Viewing 11 replies - 1 through 11 (of 11 total)
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