Gutenberg is being developed as the next generation WordPress editor. I made my first contribution earlier today. Nothing big, but something that will hopefully help people test it.  The contribution process was 💯, but for end users, that’s not the important thing. What is important is the actual editor. I’ve seen talk that Gutenberg is in “Open Beta” now, but I think calling this beta software is still premature. I think there is plenty that will change between now and any possible inclusion in WordPress core for Gutenberg. Here are my random thoughts and my first reactions to using Gutenberg.
  • It’s pretty.  And Fast. I never thought of the post editor as being slow, but there is something about Gutenberg that makes it feel fast.
  • There are a lot of rough edges. It’s hard to know what is a bug, what is intentional,  what just hasn’t been done yet, and what hasn’t been thought of.
  • There is an option for “Drop Cap” that doesn’t seem to do anything on the front end yet.
  • I’ve also never intentionally been able to highlight multiple blocks at once, but I’ve sure done it on accident a lot.
  • I can’t seem to delete some blocks without going into the text format.
  • I really like how the plugin is implemented. Being able to test Gutenberg without completely giving up the current editor is awesome and will hopefully help encourage people to test it out.
  • The tab key doesn’t let me actually add a tab, even inside a code block.
  • Existing content can’t really be imported. I hope this is something that is on the roadmap since it sure would be odd to Gutenberg sometimes not work like Gutenberg.
  • I miss a lot of the meta boxes I’m used to seeing on the screen.  Things like Yoast SEO (on some sites) and custom taxonomies are just not shown. If every metabox ever made for WordPress needs to be remade, it sure is going to make developers lives a living hell.
  • Adding images and the image block in general are confusing. For example, despite having “All da” ( which I think is “All Dates” but is cut off) selected, only my 10 most recent images are shown initially.  There are no names/text associated with the
  • I can’t figure out how to add an image to this list.
  • Autoembeds seem to work, but don’t display anything in the UI.
  • The Embed URL block tells me that I can’t embed that content, but the front end of my site tells me differently.
  • The sidebar being empty 3/4 of the time feels really odd.
  • The default state is likely my favorite “Distraction Free Writing” implementation in WordPress yet.  I’m simultaneously able to focus on my content, and yet I have all the tools I need for writing. I don’t have all the tools I need for content creation.
  • I need to take my hands off my keyboard more than usual. Adding a paragraph after a list isn’t easy to do with just a keyboard.
Lots of things are constantly changing with Gutenberg ( my small change was merged within hours of proposing it). I’m going to keep my eye on it. The content for this post was drafted in Gutenberg and I’m going to try to continue to do that going forward.  Go install Gutenberg, so you can generate your own opinons on it.