It looks like I was one of the lucky few that got early access to Gutenberg on WordPress.com. It reminds me a little of the visual editor, and as someone that always uses the code or raw text editor, it’ll take some getting used to. 

Why Try It?

Well, I have been a fan of the idea behind builders for a long time and laying out content in a nicer way. I see graphic designers do beautiful things with articles on some blogs, and I am jealous of the results. I am hopeful that Gutenberg might help me create something similar.

My Thoughts

My initial impression is that the whole thing doesn’t feel good to use. I tried out the columns (beta) and struggled to get it to work correctly. I tried to get an image to break outside of the constraints of the content area and couldn’t figure out how to do it. The inline images option feels broken and counter-intuitive, nor does it seem to want to work as I’d expect.

When I click on a block and then select Document before going back to Block, it says “no block selected”.

It doesn’t feel as slick and feature filled as any of the other builder tools I’ve used but the learning curve is still there. Even something as simple as moving blocks around feels clunky. It can be hard to access the up or down arrow on thin elements, sometimes controls will vanish before I can use them. 

Working with Gutenberg is really unintuitive. Icons disappear when you hover over them, boxes overlap, columns don’t work as expected, et cetera.

Spinal (@zanderz)

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I do like the ability to insert my latest posts as a block inside a post as I’ve done just above this text. That felt nice and it is something that didn’t feel easy or friendly before Gutenberg. 

Note: After publishing the post and seeing the difference between the back end writing experience and the front-end result, I’m even more dismayed. The spacing is all off, and the text over the cover image is wrong. In the end, I had to use spacer elements all over the place to make it look half decent and would likely have to add a bunch of custom CSS to finish integrating it. 

Will I Use It?

Of course, you’d expect my answer to be “no”, but I know many of PressTitan’s clients will want to move in the direction of using it and I’ll have to support it. I don’t want to feel left behind in helping users, especially when it comes to a core feature. I’ll be spending a ton of time with Gutenberg over the next while and you can expect a video about it on the PressTitan YouTube channel.

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