Ok, so the change has finally come. The WordPress core editor has been replaced with Gutenberg as of WordPress 5.0 (6th Dec 2018) and the change is quite substantive.

Working as a web developer, for myself, for designers, for agencies and for clients directly, I have a wide range of users with a veru wide range of capabilities; some only call on me for coding, others can’t even change a comma by themselves. This is fine, this is what I am here for, but now, all of a suddden (well, with barely a year’s notice) any client that updates will suddenly have a new interface that I will have to walk them through.

As an alternative, of course, I can install the “Classical Editor” on their sites so that they can continue to work the way that they do now. Oh joy. I have over 100 sites to consider, around 80 clients.

Some editor plug-ins will no longer work, though fortunately the big boys such as SiteOrigin (love ’em) will be compatible in time, that has taken work though so don’t expect all editor enhancements to be available. Oh, and let us not forget that the 5.0 upgrade will break WooCommerce unless that has been pre-upgraded to 3.5. Not the cleanest of upgrades to be honest.

So, how is my first look at this new editor? Well, to be honest, if you are just entering a text post/page then it is pretty easy. Looking at the “code version” though I see that (a) paragraph tags are now explicit and (b) there are active comments that give block information.

So, let’s try something a bit more clever. Adding a right justified image. This was not intuitive – I added an image block below a text block then set it right justified. Nothing. Tried to move the text block below the image. Not allowed.  Deleted the image block and re-inserted above the text block. Worked. Why was this so tricky? I couldn’t drag and drop the image at all! Yukky, frankly annoying as this is something I need to do all the time, as do my clients. Not seeing the spell checker oring here either. Hmm, not a pleasant first outing.

Draft seems to have become “pending”. I don’t mind, they are just words, but I will get a lot of client calls.