Gutenberg - First Impressions
Gutenberg is the future of WordPress Editor. It's been more than a year now since Gutenberg is getting popular among the WordPress community. The last time I checked the GitHub repository, there were about 600 known bugs. Although it's quite buggy, for now, but I'm sure the community will pull this is up by the version 5. We can see it replacing the traditional TinyMCE based WordPress Editor in WordPress 5.0.
The Gutenberg is all about replacing the traditional HTML editor system with blocks, similar to what we see in page builders. Not only WordPress but other organizations like PandaDoc, etc are using frameworks like grapesJS to build document editors. The reason is simple, blocks are more structured and increase possibilities for web-based document editors.
Now coming to the current state. The 'Try Gutenberg' callout is now officially being seen by millions of WordPress users and people are already loving the experience. The team and community have ensured to match the user experience to the current system so that transitions won't be a hurdle for users, as a big number of WordPress users are not techies.
Playing around with basic functionalities.
One of the coolest feature I noticed is reusable block. When you define a block as reusable block it'll appear in the reusable blocks list of add new section of Gutenberg. You simply select the name of your reusable block and it'll import all the content/media you've defined in your block. Good thing is once saved it can be directly added from add new section of any other posts too and if you edit content of reusable block in one post, the changes will reflect in all posts where you've the same block.
Some other good features are as follows
**1. Layout Elements **
now you can put these elements in a post without using a third party plugin or cutom code.
2. Widgets
Now you can add widgets in between your posts.
3.Embed is now easer and supports more websites
4. Text formatting and block customizations
UI for options to customise a block or format texts/images is more elegant now, hence this encourages user to do more and more experiments on the way content on a blog post looks, which is definitely a good thing. Also there are tiny improvements like changing font size, which used to be a little tricky in old version for non-techies.
5. Support for classic editor.
Even the Gutenberg is going to replace the classic WordPress Editor but it's not going enywhere. Yes you heard righ!! the if you want to enjoy both the editors, the Gutenberg community has made a small hack. You can insert the classic editor with all it's functionalities as a block.
One thing that feels a little bit wrong with Gutenberg is that the settings, customizations, additions, etc are distributed over many sections of the screens, like some options are on editor page itself, some are on top toolbar while some other are on the right sidebar. All this gives a photoshop or Sketch like feeling. This might feel weird or confusion to non-technical bloggers who know just how to type a blog and publish it by pushing the publish button.
Possibilities with the block structure are endless and we can soon see some more major additions to the features list. The overall impressions for Gutenberg are very positive and I'm looking forward to see it go mainstream.
