Finally, with the latest update of WordPress 5.0, Gutenberg has finally made its debut to your WordPress Dashboards. But is Gutenberg GOOD?
Well if you ask me I would say that it depends on the user preference and objective. The current WordPress visual editor hasn’t had many progressions throughout the years and generally, has remained basically something similar.
All things considered, numerous volunteers have been contributing to the new Gutenberg WordPress editor in the background for the past 5-6 months. Their objective? To make adding rich content to WordPress fun, easy and fast.
So let’s dive into the new Gutenberg editor and explore the ups and downs of it.
Your first question might be what is this Gutenberg editor?
Well the Gutenberg editor is the newest editor in WordPress 5.0. It was named after Johannes Gutenberg, a German inventor, printer, and publisher who introduced printing to Europe with his mechanical movable-type printing press in the 1400’s.
Using the same concept of the movable parts, Gutenberg editor uses ‘small blocks’ similar to building a brick wall by stacking it up on top of each other and hope to add more advanced layout options.
The concept of using blocks is very interesting in the context of a reusable widget on several sites or pages, but it is not really worth it if it is not always used. Because Gutenberg is still in the early stage of infancy, people are encouraged to try it out and leave comments or feedback in the WordPress support forum or open an issue on GitHub.
Now let’s look at the advantages of Gutenberg Editor
- It comes with a new slick and standardized interface
- Don’t worry, the classic editor is still available
- The ability to move the content in a desired order (eg, put an image gallery before after the heading)
- It comes with integration of galleries via a new block, rather than like last time inserting a shortcode in the editor
- It is now possible to edit the parameters of an image on the same page
- Now you will have the ability to hide the sidebar to save more space to type or insert the text content
- Now it supports keyboard shortcuts
- Wow! Now you are able to switch between several editing modes (eg. full screen, full page, etc.) for the editor
- It has the drag & drop interface to move blocks around
- The new publishing interface auto adjust according to the size of the content
- It is easy to reuse components across pages and sections of the site
- You can use the basic blocks to display the list of categories, recent publications, table, etc. without having to develop anything else on the side
- There is the possibility to improve the “blocks”
By having so much advantages you’ll be thinking that great, now I can use it as a page builder. Err.. not quite yet actually. Gutenberg will be able to make it a lot easier to stylize regular content like blog posts or standard pages, but it’s not a 1:1 substitute for page builders in its current form.
No doubt the newer version of Gutenberg lets you rearrange blocks with drag and drop, but it’s still not free-form like most page builders. So, the Gutenberg block editor is ready to eliminate the requirement for page builders for generally “standard” substance, and it additionally makes a single unified method for making more complex website designs formats in WordPress.
However, with regards to building more mind boggling pages, similar to a landing page, you’re most likely going to see the value in the more noteworthy adaptability offered by other page builders such as Elementor.
Now that we’ve discussed the advantages of Gutenberg editor, like everything else there is the other side of it, the disadvantages. In the next topic we shall cover that. See you all in the next chapter.