Doesn’t work well

I know Big Dog Matt has made Gutenberg a priority. I mean, just by name he’s comparing it to the freaking Gutenberg Press. The Gutenberg Press changed the world, bringing the power of the press to everyone.

For 2+ years I’ve heard murmurs about Gutenberg, the divided thoughts on it, yada yada yada. I’ve kept out of it because I’ve got better things to do. But now that it’s rolled into new releases and I’ve experienced trying to actually use it: I feel compelled to cry out in pain.

It’s not the Guterberg Press. And this shouldn’t be rolled into core. It’s a plugin, at best.

I’ve been with WordPress since the very beginning. Gutenberg is a turd and a half. It’s like a page builder as an editor. Like other reviews have said, it’s a decent plugin, but it shouldn’t be forced on people as it’s simply an invitation to try another platform.

I have never thought about moving my blog to Medium but I will look into it today. You spent 2+ years working on this???? C’mon.

WordPress is at a crossroads. Do you want to be a CMS? Or do you want to be a blogging platform? Because this update makes it clear to me that you want to be the former and invite the latter to leave. For me, a 10+ year user, that’s a total bummer.

Now for what’s actually functionally wrong with what I tried to use. It’s buggy as all get out. If you’re actually using it to type (as opposed to cutting and pasting) it’s just a disaster. I’m curious if anyone tried doing that before pushing this live?
– The drag/drop thing is more confusing to writers than helpful. Who the heck writes a paragraph and is like, “Nah, lemme just drag this paragraph on top of that one?” Nobody who knows how to write, that’s for sure.
– It’s incredibly distracting to get a “new block” or whatever that is every time you hit return. Literally, who thought this was a good idea? For a writer it’s very distracting. Distractions negatively impact your flow as a writer. Everything I’m seeing is a distraction as I try to figure out what to do.
– Worse than the actual issues of it being almost unusable as a writing platform– which I always had Matt pegged as an actual writer who’d protect us from this nonsense but I guess I was wrong: It’s the update feature. If I am making edits and click “update” it doesn’t update on the frontend. 5-6 refreshes and it doesn’t update. I found myself copying what I’d written to a Google Doc, than deleting the post, then creating a new post and copy/pasting from Google Docs to WP. Yeah, that’s less than elegant.

A few questions:
* How do you push something live that is this buggy?
* Have the engineers completely taken over at WP?
* Do you have people inside the org who actually are bloggers, writers and not just a bunch of developers who kinda build websites on the side? Are their voices being heard? Or is it all developers/engineers at this point?

This is a lot for a review. But I had to vent my frustration one last time before departure.