michaelfahey

I’m no stranger to WordPress, got several plugins published in the repository, several more on GitHub, and many more unpublished, (plus several themes none of which I’ve published.)

After a month or two of life with Gutenberg I have to say I find it to be… unusable.

Gutenberg’s installed my plugin dev WP instance, and as part of code testing/writing I needed to embed a quick snip of raw HTML into the page.

Couldn’t do it with Gutenberg. Either the blocks are too buggy to run right (Chrome 68, Arch Linux), or the interface is so unintuitive that I couldn’t find the option. There is no doubt that the blocks are buggy, and not only that but on a limited system (say Core 2) the lag from all the JS in the browser makes just using them exremely difficult. And before you blame Arch or Core 2 I find Gutenberg just as difficult when I test on a Win7 i5 machine, about as baseline as a person could ask for.

Had to turn off Gutenberg to get the page set up right.
If I, as a developer, can’t get it to work, then how is the the average person?

I’m not opposed to Gutenberg as a plugin, who knows maybe someday it will evolve into something good, but I fear that if it’s rolled into Core anytime soon it will ruin WordPress.

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.

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().

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.

I have to agree, not only did Gutenberg break existing elements in the Dashboard, but front-end output format was also affected – and Gutenberg had not been allowed to even make any edits! I would guess this has to be due to Gutenberg breaking existing plugins.

Uninstalling the Gutenberg plugin immediately restored front-end output.
I didn’t take the time to find out why, will have to do that on a dev machine.
Tiny MCE was a pretty awful editor, but at least it didn’t monkeywrench existing sites/code/plugins.

I sincerely hope that if the WP developers insist on rolling Gutenberg into future core WP releases, that provision is made to entirely disable it, so that existing sites can get still get WP updates.

• This reply was modified 6 years, 3 months ago by michaelfahey.