Breaks too much, lacks the one feature that would have made it worth the trouble

  • I understand the desire for a new WP editor. Look at the existing options:

    (1) Tiny MCE is a funny old dog that looks like a refugee from Geocities.
    (how many of you have come back to your carefully embedded and nested tags to find that someone has used Tiny MCE to remove all the indentation and half of the hard returns, stuffed in a ton of shortcodes? Bad stuff.)

    (2) The text editor is rudimentary at best; update button doesn’t use AJAX, jumps to the top of the screen while the page refreshes during EVERY save, no code highlighting or delimiter-matching. not even a fixed-width font. You’re on your own there.

    So I wasn’t surprised at the existence of Gutenberg. What did surprise me about Gutenberg:

    (1) I can’t believe that the new editor would include no provision for responsive content (correct me if I’m wrong). These “blocks” seem like perfect candidates to have responsive grid classes wrapped around them. But if you look at the HTML, it’s worse than nothing, it adds hard-coded inline width and height attributes. Is the assumption being made that everyone is going to be using WP on old clunky desktop computers? The new paradigm is mobile-first, phones and iPads, responsive page templates, responsive page content (it’s easy to get desktops right.)

    (2) It breaks things. I couldn’t even test it on a live site, looks like it trashed control over wp_autop and the site was infested with <p> tags, hosed the front end format. Why should a new editor break existing un-edited pages?

    (3) Apparently it stores data in a non-backwards compatible way in the database?

    (4) Slated to be in core?
    I would look on Gutenberg favorably if it was a new project in embryo, but it’s not ready to be in core.

    EDIT: Revised my rating up a little bit. Gutenberg is interesting software and I unfairly gave it a very low rating because I wanted to discourage it as a core feature.

    • This topic was modified 6 years, 3 months ago by michaelfahey.
Viewing 4 replies - 1 through 4 (of 4 total)
  • Thread Starter michaelfahey

    (@michaelfahey)

    I see now that I can manually add a class to some block types, so I could be manually applying some responsive behavior through CSS – but why just the one class? Why not a string of classes? (ala bootstrap 3 “col-xs-12 col-sm-6 col-md-4”).

    Would have been really neat to include a feature that would have allowed for regular users to be able to assign some responsive classes like the bootstrap example in an automated/graphical fashion.

    Thread Starter michaelfahey

    (@michaelfahey)

    As for database backwards compatibility problems:
    Looks like that was a rogue’s tale:

    Edited an existing page in Gutenberg, then Deactivated the plugin. What remained was just extra HTML comments.

    <!-- wp:shortcode -->
[asd_insert_pagesections pagesectiongroups="test2"]
<!-- /wp:shortcode -->

<!-- wp:quote -->
<blockquote class="wp-block-quote"><p>This is some sort of quote.</p></blockquote>
<!-- /wp:quote -->

<!-- wp:paragraph -->
<p></p>
<!-- /wp:paragraph -->

    Created a page from scratch, same results, and the Title transferred to the title field, was not in the_content().

    Thread Starter michaelfahey

    (@michaelfahey)

    My page meta fields are showing up just fine, contrary to what I was told would happen, filter and action hooks are all working as usual as far I can see.

    If the wpautop issue was solved, I could go-live with this.

    Apologies for the run-on review. The learning curve on Gutenberg is steep, the interface is alien, and it’s not clear what’s happening at first. But once you get past that there is a lot to like, definite potential.

    I still don’t think it should be in core – yet.

    Plugin Author Tammie Lister

    (@karmatosed)

    First, thanks for the review @michaelfahey. You make an important point about responsive and I agree it’s important and that mobile-first is the way forward. Most blocks are designed to respond, did you find this wasn’t the case or was it specific blocks? Reading a bit on it seems though you want to apply specific classes to particular adaptive points, is my reading of that correct?

    I am sorry you experienced it breaking, Could I ask what was the theme you were using and if any other plugins? I ask just because I really would like to find out what was broken for you.

    Apologies for the run-on review.

    No apology needed, it’s great to follow along and I hope to get to the bottom of that error for you.

Viewing 4 replies - 1 through 4 (of 4 total)
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