Pointless garbage

There’s a good reason why the WordPress editor has remained largely unchanged for so long – it WORKS. It’s based on a solid, word processor style interface that everyone is familiar with and is easy to use. Gutebberg, on the other hand, is clearly a pet project from its developers who wish to ram it down everyone’s throats no matter what.

If the developers want to make Gutenberg available, why not simply provide it as a plugin, as before WordPress 5.0, or at least give people the OPTION to toggle it if they wish to use it. Forcing people to use something that they have neither asked for nor want is not the way to go.

Look at the overwhelming response to Gutenberg – the comments and ratings speak for themselves, as do the thousands who are installing plugins to bypass it. And before anyone thinks “Oh, but there’s always resistance to change”, this has nothing to do with change, at least apart from the fact that change is simply not needed. This is to do with the fact that Gutenberg is not an improvement. It’s slow, confusing, limited, ugly and adds nothing to the end user experience. Anyone with even a tiny amount of experience in Microsoft Word can jump straight into the WordPress editor and completely understand how most of it works. Not so with Gutenberg. It just doesn’t work straight out of the box. In the time it took me to try to work out how to simply add an image and drag it to where I want the anchor point to be on the page (something that is, again, a standard procedure in word processor style editors), I could have added and formatted an entire blog post right off the bat with the normal editor. Whereas with Gutenberg, I still haven’t worked out how to set an image where I want it. And this is coming from someone who has over 30 years computing experience and was able to jump straight into WordPress upon first view and easily work out exactly how to lay things out from the editor. Not so with Gutenberg.

There is a plethora of builders out there, most of which are vastly superior to Gutenberg. Bottom line – Gutenberg is not needed, it’s not wanted by the vast majority and it simply does not work well. In one fell swoop the WordPress user experience has been destroyed. If this carries on and we are forced to use Gutenberg rather than at least have it as an option, WordPress is going to lose many, many, many users, as well as alternative, Gutenberg-free versions of WordPress popping up (which is already happening).

Gutenberg is like trying to restore a priceless painting by taking a sledgehammer to it – instead of it being a careful, subtle process it’s just been whacked and destroyed.

• This topic was modified 6 years, 3 months ago by glennshep. Reason: Forgot to set the star rating to 1. I only wish I could rate at as 0