A week after the “Try Gutenberg” prompt appears in WordPress site’s admin dashboard, Gutenberg plugin reached the threshold of 100,000+ Active Installs. The plugin is getting mixed reviews between “Not in Core” and “Blogging just received a massive upgrade”. Gutenberg developers are weeding through the actionable feedback from this first encounter with a huge user base. In the meantime, plugins developers are working hard on getting ready for the WordPress 5.0 release, and Block developers are building new Blocks for Gutenberg content creators.
Table of contents
- News from the WordPress Core and Gutenberg Team
- Community Reactions
- Plugins Getting Ready for Gutenberg in Core
- Let them have Blocks! #280blocks
- Photos from around the World
News from the WordPress Core and Gutenberg Team
WordPress’ Gutenberg: The Long View https://t.co/jUNb84IenC
— Gary (@GaryPendergast) August 6, 2018
Friendly reminder that there are real humans behind the open source software you use daily. They tirelessly support, maintain and care for every single aspect. You can disagree, please do, debate leads to iteration. In debating, remember they are a human and have lives. ❤️
— Tammie Lister (@karmatosed) August 4, 2018
I think that the best explanation for the vitriol in the That Plugin's™ reviews is that people don't realize a simple thing.
— Jan "SUCH COFFEE SO GOOD RESPECT COFFEE" Dembowski (@jan_dembowski) August 8, 2018
The WordPress support forums are not a blog.
Those reviews are not blog posts.
Your replies are not blog comment. (1/2)
Support Team lead and Forums Moderator, Marius Jenson, keeps us updated on the known issues and published an FAQ
The problem with #Gutenberg and images: Same theme, same images, same setup, 1.8MB of images with Gutenberg, 327KB without. This will have a dramatic impact on performance. One of several related tickets: https://t.co/otSNXQQPmd pic.twitter.com/EZXiSpdWq7
— Morten Rand-Hendriksen (@mor10) August 5, 2018
Gutenberg could provide offline editing in WordPress, and not just for the post open in a tab when you get disconnected: a service worker could make the edit post screen available offline, and background sync could push changes once reconnected: https://t.co/5J3KEM9R4p #PWA
— Weston Ruter (@westonruter) August 6, 2018
Community Reactions
I tried #WordPress's new #Gutenberg for the first time in like 8 months today. I'm excited to see how the project is coming along and how my ACF and Yoast meta boxes still work. I also absolutely love the Ajax saving. It saves much faster and is helping me out big time!
— Tyler Smith (@RaspberryTyler) August 7, 2018
Wanted to tweet something snarky about devs whining about WordPress being bad and wanting Drupal. Because now perhaps they are getting WordPress (Gutenberg) code thrown at them.
— Joost de Valk (@jdevalk) August 7, 2018
But I won’t. Because I just love it.https://t.co/UzaEAthnWB
Y'all talk to your sites as well, right?
— 🌴 Martin MacDonald 🌴 (@searchmartin) August 7, 2018
WordPress: we've updated your site, you got Gutenberg!
Me: oh shit, everyones moaning about it..
WP: have you tried it?
Me: No, gimme 10.
…….
Me: What the hell's the problem with this? Its better than the old editor thing, by far?!?
Gutenberg Plugin Garners Mixed Reactions from New Wave of Testers
It’s amazing – my theme supports it and I ttotally love it.
— Rajesh Advani (@advanirajesh) August 4, 2018
Users’ most favorite new editing features
Yeah that is pretty nifty especially for continuing keyboard usage:-) One of my favorite part of Gutenberg is the easy to use Buttons. Use it, change the color, write the action text + link, align it. Fast & beautiful. Brilliant!
— Birgit Pauli-Haack (@bph) August 8, 2018
One of my favourite new features in Gutenberg: Shared Blocks. Super functional for things like common CTAs. See also – templates! https://t.co/dGjCaHi1Ye ❤️
— Andy McIlwain 🍁 (@andymci) August 8, 2018
Plugins Getting Ready for Gutenberg in Core
The State of ACF in a Gutenberg World https://t.co/OnJFCWuOf0 #Gutenberg #WordPress
— Advanced Custom Fields (@wp_acf) August 8, 2018
Officially still on holiday… But, testing our @yoast SEO Gutenberg integration as the first real integration piece is due next week, this is making me happy (and extremely proud of our team):#gutenberg #wordpress #yoast pic.twitter.com/UHFAdH0wAt
— Joost de Valk (@jdevalk) August 8, 2018
Let them have Blocks! #280blocks
WordPress Gutenberg blocks are mostly built in React (we have a whole series on this) :: https://t.co/EF3miBKmOg
— CSS-Tricks (@css) August 5, 2018
But they don't HAVE to be. Here's how you could do it in Vue: https://t.co/FevT3SzcFa
That was a killer moment: (Proposed?) Gutenberg HIG documentation just made live. Quote: "Human Interface Guidelines, or "HIGs", are an essential tool to help developers and designers adhere to a platform's best design practices." https://t.co/9namOhKNkN #wcpub
— Andy McIlwain 🍁 (@andymci) August 8, 2018
The RichText component coming in WordPress 5.0's new gutenberg editor makes it extremely easy to create content-rich blocks for your users. https://t.co/oJNw0nVj5i pic.twitter.com/YLWW051rfo
— Jason Yingling (@jason_yingling) August 7, 2018
Whooahhh I am honored! Build blocks, everyone! In case you missed it: https://t.co/QRGSgqPuag https://t.co/E6bfR4KSbu
— Lara Schenck (@laras126) August 7, 2018
#Gutenberg Plugin from @kevinbazira that adds interactive 360° images to #WordPress https://t.co/wikTxGQLDi pic.twitter.com/4cvu4czHoQ
— David Bisset (@dimensionmedia) August 9, 2018
A #Gutenberg block to add book details and a star rating to a book review https://t.co/Gd4kFBneNc pic.twitter.com/CH2mGkiRZp
— David Bisset (@dimensionmedia) August 7, 2018
Photos from around the World
Abdullah Ramzan session on Gutenberg & Custom Block Development#WCKHI pic.twitter.com/dJC1nZELt9
— Nouman Younas (@Noumaan22) August 4, 2018
Gutenbering with @ChrisVanPatten in our first session on the #wcpub main track pic.twitter.com/3eT3XnHv8Q
— WordCamp for Publishers (@wcpublishers) August 8, 2018
Featured Image: Photo by Michał Parzuchowski on Unsplash
7 Comments
Isn’t this such an exciting time!
GB is firing up the entire community and, we’re witnessing real change and real progress IMO!
Just soaking it in…
Very exciting times, indeed! Thanks for stopping by, Marcus! What is your favorite Gutenberg feature?
By Post Author
Believe it or not I just discovered the Spacer block. I sure seem to use it a lot when converting my site’s pages from Classic to Gutenberg. LOL!
I had to chuckle on the “Spacer Block”:-) Immediately created a reusable block with the right spacing, so I wouldn’t have adjust it every time I use it. Of course, you have a much better control over your blocks, when you augment your Themes stylsheet via the Customizer.
Here is a question for you: Why would you convert your existing pages to Gutenberg blocks? Unless of course, you want to edit them….
By Post Author
That’s a great idea Birgit! I kept changing the Spacer block’s default from 100 to 50 about a thousand times. Duh!
The reason we are converting our site’s pages one by one over to Gutenberg is for three reasons:
1. To further learn Gutenberg (testing is one thing but converting a live site is more interesting and fun)! If you ask someone to test Gutenberg its ho-hum. But, if you ask them to start converting a live site to Gutenberg then the conversations kick in and things get lively. LOL!
2. The Classic editor will eventually go away. What then? Might as well start eating our own dogwood now.
3. How can you improve your editing skills if you put your head in the sand and just turn on the Classic Editor all the time. We’ve turned the Classic Editor on for our existing client sites but, from now on all new clients will get Gutenized.
Totally get it. It is one thing, though, to convert 20 pages, it another when you have thousands of posts:-) It just doesn’t scale well and it’s not necessary.
As to your question: “The classic editor will eventually go away. What then?” – Just because the editor goes away, doesn’t mean the content goes away. The theme will still display your content.
And if further down the road you need to edit a pre-Gutenberg post or page, the ‘Classic Block’ will be offered and also the feature to convert to a block, as it does now.
Cheers!
This reminds me of the days when Theme authors would lock sites in and it was painful to switch themes.
However, there are some case scenarios where converting the site to all Gutenberg makes sense even though the site you want to convert has a thousand or thousands of posts.
We have a family archive comprised of thousands of posts and tens of thousands of photos and albums. It’s a huge site.
The site has been in existence since 2002, and hopefully it will remain for hundreds/thousands of years into the future.
Over the years this site has been updated with new themes, new plugins, new widgets and new photo management systems. We have kept it up to date with the latest plugins and technologies not letting it rot on the vine. We see converting the posts and pages to Gutenberg as just another update. So even though others believe its not necessary we believe it is.
Believe me we’ve gotten good at regular expressions – LOL!