Update #83 WordPress Gutenberg over 100K Active Installs, Community Reactions, Plugins and more Blocks

Photo by Michał Parzuchowski on Unsplash

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. 

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News from the WordPress Core and Gutenberg Team

https://twitter.com/jan_dembowski/status/1027153946287267840

Support Team lead and Forums Moderator, Marius Jenson, keeps us updated on the known issues and published an FAQ

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Community Reactions

https://twitter.com/micathedancer/status/1026727890321170432
https://wpcouple.com/gutenberg-reactions/
https://twitter.com/JohnRMeese/status/1026812115510861824
Gutenberg Plugin Garners Mixed Reactions from New Wave of Testers

Users’ most favorite new editing features

https://twitter.com/andymci/status/1027204081474039813
Note: Shared Blocks are now called “Reuseable Blocks” –bph

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Plugins Getting Ready for Gutenberg in Core

https://wpcouple.com/wordpress-plugins-adopting-gutenberg-a-case-study-featuring-gravity-forms/

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Let them have Blocks! #280blocks

https://twitter.com/andymci/status/1027209831004954624

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Photos from around the World

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Featured Image: Photo by Michał Parzuchowski on Unsplash

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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!