Dear Gutenberg, I do not like you.
Haven't written anything here in a while because I've been busy with life, work and my online business that is slowly but consistently forging on. I felt I should share this as a warning to all my friends in WA.
So, recently I decided a great way to recap the year with my site would be to go through all my posts and update them with fresh content.
I thought the easiest way would be to just edit them in the Wordpress post editor before publishing.
As most of you know, the Wordpress 5.0 Gutenberg rolled out last week and already had its first update. I instantly heard some alarming things about bugs in it but still decided to update for site security.
Well, last night I was already running late after a long and busy day, rewriting and updating an old post. I had written 1000+ words and was just adding some links to finish off and head to bed.
The link tool keeps bugging when you try to link internally jumping all over the screen and it did this weird "select all" bug to the text couple times but I managed to add the link I wanted.
As I started to do my final check, to my horror I realized all the updated content was gone! No problem, there are auto saved revisions I thought.
Well, there were three revisions. One from a minute ago, one from June and one from July. Gutenberg had destroyed my content.
So a friendly heads up for you folks: If you edit old content more than a couple lines, do it in an external editor! Copy paste to Word or WAs Site Content editor for example.
I was furious and tired but determined. I wrote it all again right there and then and went to bed well past midnight.
Recent Comments
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Yeah, just made the update to 5.0.2 (so two updates already). I've used block-based editing systems before but Gutenberg is dreadful. It takes more clicks and time to do anything now. Functions aren't in logical places (at least to me).
I wanted to update a page which involved copying and pasting a bit of code, changing 3 links and 1 image and updating. Takes about 5 minutes on the old editor. It took me over an hour in Gutenberg. It kept insisting it knew better than me where I wanted to place my image.
In the old editor, you could put your cursor before or after an image to add a blank line. Can't do that in Gutenberg.
Also, the break link feature doesn't work.
Post preview take forever to display and sometimes don't display the latest (unsaved) changes.
Gutenberg's been released too early. It's not ready for public consumption. The WP developers should have done a lot more QA and Beta testing on it before release.
And they didn't even give is the option to switch back to the Classic Editor. We're being forced into using a crappy Block Editor.
I hate when software engineers leave me out of the decision making process (I speak as a former programmer) because their choices are almost always wrong and just make things more difficult for the end user.
So, despite the WP developers trying to force me into using the rickety, user-unfriendly Gutenberg, I've gone back to using the Classic Editor (I might revisit Gutenberg when WP 6 is released).
If you want to do the same, here's the procedure:
1. Go to your WordPress 5.0 Dashboard.
2. Click on Plugins->Add New
3. In the Plugin search box given at right side search for "Classic Editor" (without the quotes).
4. Install the Classic Editor and Activate it.
5. Once the Plugin gets Activated then go to Settings->Writing.
6. Under the Writing section select the"Default Editor for All Users: Classic Editor" and Save it.
Job done and no more time wasted using Gutenberg.
Thanks for the tutorial on how to revert back to a classic editor. I'll do that right now and will keep using it for the time being! It's stupid you have to install a plugin (is it even WP or third party?) to accomplish this though.
Couldn't agree with you more about software engineers no understanding the customers/users needs and bringing them in to the decision making enough. With a platform like Wordpress it's just weird they would push out something incomplete like this considering they must be the most popular CMS in the world.
Thanks for the tips Gary and have a Merry Christmas!
I often do the copy/ paste method... solely out of fear!
I feel your pain with this!
Shaunna
Argh! Nightmare! :-(
I always use an external wordprocessor.
Glad you got it rewritten in the end.
Ian
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At least you wrote it all again and that shows perseverance which is what writing is all about. From day one 2/3 of the reviews on Gutenberg have been negative. 653 1 star ratings sums it up for me. I am sticking with my Generate pro theme with free Elementor page builder.
Thank you for sharing this and helping others.
Brad
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