Innovative Step into the Future

I applaud the Gutenberg team for this massive undertaking. Love the ease of going back and forth between code and visual blocks as well as the dozens of other innovations. People need to realize it’s a work in progress but is getting closer to being ready. The latest update has been a tremendous improvement in terms of performance. Absolutely love the emphasis on classes being appended to blocks, this will make it so that we can encourage users to style up content with ease. A few things that should be addressed:

1. When inserting post link titles it should insert the post’s name instead of the URL. This is how the old editor did it which is much more SEO/human friendly. People like titles over clunky URL’s for names. Also note that the site’s domain is included which is redundant due to folks knowing where they are viewing.

On a side note the padding between the suggested post titles feels too crowded. The old editor had perfected this. Also if “Link Settings” (triple dot) showed a field for the link title this would be an additional improvement. The old editor allowed you to edit the title in the advanced link settings. Took me a bit of time to realize you have to edit the text to edit the link title.

2. Re-usable blocks are a little trickier to use when making modifications. For example if you create a paragraph or other block type and set it to re-usable you have to manually click “Edit” each time you want to make changes to that block. However a non-reusable paragraph block you can click the block and start modifying the text right away which is a bit easier. Aside from clicking the “Edit” button being inconsistent; it’s more work.

3. Currently it feels like a little more effort to create lists and other DOM elements due to blocks being so segregated. For example if I create a paragraph block and want to add a list for easy points I have to create a new block instead of it being readily available. With the old editor you could click the bullet point button and start creating points right away. Semantically the DOM elements need to be separated; however blocks could store both sets of DOM elements. The HTML comment <!– wp:paragraph –> could decipher where the blocks begin/end.

4. Consider consolidating the cog icon that shows/hides the right side bar into the “More” menu and putting it under the “Writing” heading. This way it doesn’t feel like a bunch of options but is fairly obvious where to toggle the sidebar display.