Hi Tammie,
Let me just say upfront that I’m an early adopter, a closet techie and I love testing things out. So when I had the opportunity to use Gutenberg, I jumped at it.
And immediately regretted it.
Let me give you an analogy: it’s like stepping outside your front door in the morning, and getting into your car for the drive to work. And suddenly, everything is different. Dashboard reconfigured, different steering wheel, speedo in miles instead of kilometres (or vice versa), pedals moved.
You know the route to work by heart, and yet the car won’t budge until you’ve set a course in the satnav. But guess what? The satnav is super-complicated and you’re already late for work.
On your mobile phone, there’s a self-congratulatory message from the car manufacturer saying they’re SO excited about this new upgrade! It redefines the driving experience, giving you a whole host of cool new features.
But here’s the thing: you don’t actually need those cool new features.
You’re now even later for work, and wondering if there’s any way to get the old configuration of your car back. Turning the key in the ignition, putting the car in gear in gear and pulling away was so simple it required no thought. Stopping, starting, accelerating, decelerating. It was all second nature.
Simple just became complicated. There’s lots of pain, and you just can’t see the gain.
THAT’S what it feels like, Tammie.
Let me ask you some questions now. Why did you do this? What problem were you solving? What was it the tried-and-trusted, familiar WordPress editor didn’t do that people were crying out for?
What was the trigger for this huge change – revolution, not evolution?
Blocks, really? What’s all that about? People are used to their word processor (no blocks there) or email program (ditto). Fire up the editor, and start writing.
Bullets, numbered paras, headings, font size, blockquotes. It was all there. You could go full-screen or distraction-free and focus on what you were actually writing, without popup menus and boxes getting in the way.
Who do you think uses the WordPress editor? People who write. They’re churning out updates for their company, or blog posts for their personal site, or any sort of content. It’s generally linear, and text-based.
They don’t need obstacles in their way as they type – and that’s the beauty of the current editor. You can do pretty much everything you need.
Gutenberg seems to me to be a solution in search of a problem. Somebody cooked up the idea internally, thought it was really ‘cool’ (that word should set off alarm bells) and bam! It had a life, and a momentum, of its own.
Tunnel vision and confirmation bias did the rest, and now it’s unstoppable.
Except it isn’t. Now is a good time to pause, take a deep breath and do a reality check.
The 1-star reviews are damning – absolutely damning. Reviews I’ve read on other WP specialist sites are even worse.
Please don’t go down the route of making this the default. Would it be so difficult simply to add a third tab to the current editor (so we have Visual, Text, Gutenberg)? At least that way people have the choice.
Clearly you’ve made an error of judgement on this one, but there’s still time to pull back from the precipice. If you don’t, you’re going to alienate millions of WP users worldwide.
