Helpful, but needs polishing

This is an extremely useful plugin which has the potential to save a lot of time. There are a few things I would love to see developed further:

1. It only works with Posts and Pages. It doesn’t recognize custom post types. The authors have noted that if this is a requested feature they may build it out, so I’m hopeful that will be coming eventually.

2. It doesn’t convert shortcodes properly. Any shortcodes I have in my posts ended up being converted to empty shortcode blocks – meaning the shortcode itself, along with all the attributes, were lost. So I had to manually go back and fill those in. I’m hoping this is a bug where WP Core changed something in the matrix and the plugin just hasn’t caught up, but will.

3. Custom blocks are another pitfall. If you’re working on a site where part of the content has already been converted, and you have non-Core blocks (whether they’re from plugins or themes or your own custom built), the plugin doesn’t have a way to recognize the custom blocks and so things get converted to just Core blocks – often custom HTML. This doesn’t surprise me, since the only way to handle custom blocks would be to give this plugin some sort of “If you encounter this specific HTML, create this specific Block, using these rules” instructions. I would love to see it opened up to where developers could include templates just like that – so those of us who have partially-converted sites or custom blocks already in mind could ensure that the desired blocks are always used.

4. It doesn’t handle crummy HTML well. One of my sites has a lot of legacy posts where there are various forms of bad HTML:

Heading tags that have images and paragraphs inside of them (the images and paragraphs get lost, so only the headings remain)

Copied-and-pasted text wrapped in a single <p> </p> wrapper (this all ends up as one custom HTML block, with a ton of <br> tags where all the manual line breaks were)

And so on. This is another case where, even if you don’t have custom blocks, it would be nice to allow the user to define specific HTML-to-Block templates of their own to handle these known situations.

Overall, I’m impressed, and all of my Posts and Pages where content was straightforward and not needing custom blocks processed very quickly and seamlessly. I also find it very useful to see how many Posts and Pages have yet to be converted – it makes almost a checklist. (Might be nice if the plugin also kept track of how many it specifically has converted, versus people manually converting things, to show its value.) I’m grateful to the developers for releasing this. It’s a wonderfully huge help.