I took the plunge and turned off the Wordpress classic editor plugin.

byLTidswell

264 followers

6 years ago

So, I like to think I'm a bit unique (I hope its true!). I'm one of the early millennial, on the Gen X cusp really, although that is dependent on which resource you used to define the start and end of the generations. As such I grew up reading books and playing outside - be we also had a series of home computers.

In high school and university learning the basics of coding was required (although I probably hadn't touched HTML in twenty years at the point where I went to put an index in my blog post for the first time), so I have a level of comfort with multiple coding languages (read - I don't run away screaming, but I've only really used VBA and SQL in recent history). The first time I encountered Gutenberg blocks was when I disabled all the plug ins on my site which was running painfully slowly (https://my.wealthyaffiliate.com/ltidswell/blog/painful-loadi...). I hated it - I couldn't do anything, classic editor was the first plugin I reactivated.

What to do with my time?

Fast forward two weeks, I'm in the UK, I work for a manufacturing company which is currently closed (due to our market, and physical constraints making it impractical to build in demand commodities at this point) so I'm on furlough with plenty of time to learn new skills. After commenting on another member's post via the comments thread, I used their affiliate link to buy a training course that was outside my comfort zone, but included skills that I need to develop (I really think we should be supporting each other in this way, and I intend to continue doing so when I encounter something that fits into my overall strategy).

The presenter said - "buy this tool to create landing pages" - not a shock... I expected additional affiliate links within the course content, then he said "or you can do it this way for much less but its harder"... better this fits into my bootstrapping philosophy - but it still means paying someone for a skill that I need. And I have the time, I bet I can create a template for a landing page...

Down the Gutenberg Block Rabbit Hole I go...

I have to say, YouTube and two screens have been my best friends in this. I chose a generic page creation YouTube video and followed along with creating a fairly basic but very pretty landing page. I think it took me 3 hours to work through the 25-minute video - but by pausing it, moving back and forth and creating the page alongside the presenter I learned so much.

I've not published the page I created, its completely unrelated to my brand or niche but the skills that I gained undertaking this exercise have been incredibly helpful. I've discovered while there are a lot of benefits to site content, I can't maximize my productivity with it.

So I tried writing my last blog post in the Wordpress post editor, using blocks. Being able to add and configure all the elements as I go works really well for me, so I'm afraid I've done a complete u-turn on Gutenberg Blocks. It also interacts with Grammarly, which I couldn't get site content to do.

Is this adding value?

I've read multiple places that the support for the classic editor will be ending in 2021, so I'd really recommend that people familarise themselves with the blocks sooner rather than later. The build in blocks do make a number of elements quite easy - and you can convert existing posts easily. Although, I'd really recommend having a play with it first - trying to do something under pressure was very frustrating!

Cheers,

Lisa