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It’s true that Gutenberg is not quite ready for prime time. There are definitely some improvements and tweaks that still need to be made. But then, it hasn’t been released yet.
It’s true that the interface is confusing. There is a learning curve. It’s not so intuitive out of the box. It takes some experimentation. It takes some effort to figure out where everything is now that the cluttered TinyMCE is no longer front and center.
But it’s worth the effort.
If your focus is writing content– headings and paragraphs– nothing has really changed. New blocks are paragraphs by default, so you can still type as fast your ideas flow. But now you can move entire paragraphs without copy and pasting– just move the block up or down. Inserting paragraphs, adding headings, and adding images are as simple as inserting new blocks.
Where blocks really shine at this time is when you have a need to insert custom HTML. Instead of switching your entire document from the visual editor to code, scrolliing through the document to find the location, pasting or composing the HTML and then switching back to the visual editor, you do it within the HTML block. Need to edit the block further? It’s at your fingertips. This has the potential to be a big time saver.
And you can make any block reusable. So let’s say you have affiliate links page and need an affiliate disclaimer. Once you compose that disclaimer you can make the block reusable. Then whenever you need that disclaimer, you only have to select that reusable block. Need to change the wording? Edit the block and the changes take place wherever that block is used across the site.
Now, I know what you are thinking. The same functionality can be accomplished with shortcodes. But that would require another plugin when in fact, the need for some plugins is eliminated by blocks.
As more developers embrace blocks, the Gutenberg editor will become more powerful.
One caveat, though. There are plugins popping up that are “collections” of blocks. So you could end up with multiple blocks of similar functionality which will add to bloat. I am not a coder so I don’t know how feasible this is, but it would be nice to be able to install individual blocks with a way to delete ones that you don’t want. Just a thought…
At any rate, for the average user, Gutenberg definitely takes some getting used to. But once you play around with it for a while, you will realize that it really isn’t a whole lot different than the classic editor, once you learn where everything is. And it has the potential to be a lot more powerful.
To reach that potential, more of us need to get behind Gutenberg as a community. To say that it’s a “disaster,” or complain that “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” doesn’t help much. But if we give the developers the specifics of what can be made better, they can focus their energy on those improvements.