strawberryjamm

I think I was the last (or one of the very last) people to post on the old thread, right before the admin so rudely closed it.

As a user experience designer, I can confirm that, especially for novice users (both new to WP or who have only used it a little), but also for experienced but non-technical users, the default edit behaviour when the current theme isn’t Gutenberg-friendly is both disconcerting and frustrating. It is quite unrealistic for any application developer to simply expect every technical administrator of existing sites to change their site’s theme – after all not all 3rd party themes will be updated to work with Gutenberg and even those with a site that uses a custom-built theme may not have a WP theme developer available to update it. Similarly, expecting those with old themes will install a 3rd party workaround plugin is very un-friendly – especially considering that plugin might be discontinued in the future and then they’ll just be right back where they started.

While knowing what workarounds are available is great, it would be so much better if the default behaviour was to set the editor to full width instead of being fixed to an arbitrarily narrow view.

@melchoyce, @otto42

I am a user experience professional who manages the WordPress sites for a volunteer-run non-profit organization. I would say that the problem here is with the default behaviour of the block-based editor – that is, what happens when a theme is not set up specifically to work with blocks. As implemented, the default displays a super-narrow window which does not resize no matter how much horizontal space is actually available. This makes many editing tasks, especially ones that are width-dependent such as working with tables or columns, more than just a little frustrating. It would be significantly better for everyone if this default behaviour presented something that, while “wrong” (in that it is not WYSIWYG), is the most functionally usable. Which, in this case, means that the block editor expands to the full width of the editor viewport space (perhaps save for a narrow margin).

Consider that all of the templates that existed prior to this upgrade will not be set up to work with blocks and many of those may never be “fixed”. The existing default behaviour essentially makes the WordPress editing experience absolutely abysmal for almost everyone with a previously existing site right off the bat and will continue to do so until such time as a large number of templates are properly updated.

Thus, my recommendation: Update the block editor to default to “fully expanded” when the current theme doesn’t supply the code that would allow the editor to correctly coordinate in a WYSIWYG manner.

• This reply was modified 6 years ago by strawberryjamm. Reason: fix typos