We talked yesterday about Gutenberg and how it came about. We did touch briefly on some pros and cons, but today we want to dig in a little more and also see how designers feel about the new release.

Pros

Playing with Blocks

One of the things the new Gutenberg editor gives us is blocks to play with. Not the ones from our childhood but close. It’s very much a drag and drop style and it gives you more freedom than the previous editor for how your page will look.  It’s designed to allow you to visualize your page as you build it. The best part is that once you have created a layout that you really love, now you don’t have to keep recreating that layout. You can just save the block and load it onto another similar pages (like blog posts)- easy peasy.

Better Focus

Some people can get distracted by all the menus and other things going on in the backend of your site. Gutenberg gives you the new ability to focus on your content and less of what is going on around the edges. With the new full-screen template you can stay focused and rock that page out!

Mobile Friendly!

The new editor and the new setup with the blocks have made it easier to focus on your building and worry less about building mobile friendly. If you use the new block editor, then your pages are already set up to play well with any screen size. You can even edit your pages from a mobile device, making updates to your site quick while on the go.

Cons

Learning Curves

We talked above about the blocks. While this is something that newbies to designing a page will find easy to learn, designers that are used to the previous editor may find it more difficult. The menus are different and things are not in the same places. Take heart though, like anything else, this may be difficult at first but with more practice, you will be an expert again.

Not always compatible

There are thousands of themes and plugins for WordPress. Unfortunately, many users are finding that moving to the new Gutenberg release, plugins and themes are breaking because they aren’t compatible. This can be a serious problem as it causes sites to go down until the conflict is resolved by finding a new theme or removing the plugin. They are working on a fix, but with so many things needing to be changed, it’s going to take time.

No APIs

If you are familiar with what goes into building a website, you know that they are very dependent on using APIs to connect to other programs or systems. Unfortunately, the new WordPress version doesn’t support APIs which makes it a serious problem for some websites.

Look, every time something new comes along in technology there are bugs. There are things that people love and people hate. The best example is with each new version of phones that come out, there are always bugs at the beginning that have to be worked out. The same with Gutenberg. So just be patient and things will start to smooth out. Come see us next week and we will let you in on how to have the current version of WordPress but still have the classic editor you love.