Upcoming new WordPress Editor – Gutenberg

Hello dear Tagdiv-Team,

today I have read an article from YOAST about the upcoming new wordpress-editor Gutenberg. In this article he wrote, that most themes and plugins (right now) are absolutely not able to become compatible, as the whole inner-strucutre of editing pages and posts will be absolutely different, from what it now is.

As I am not a tech-pro – I just understood half of it. But it made me worry and concerned enough, to write this post here. Just to ask you – officialliy – what your opinion about Gutenberg is.

Are your themes quite ready for Gutenberg? As we – meanwhile – have a few thousand articles up and running in our magazine, I am absolutely afraid, that Gutenberg could completely destroy our Layout – until the projekt can give us some fixes …

Is Gutenberg already discussed within your Team? Are you working on it?

Best and warmest regards
Torsten

Gutenberg is a simple page builder for sites without one; it’s not needed if using TD themes as it includes option for 2 different page builders, including TDcomposer, fully integrated with theme.

A *lot* of developers, WP websites/blogs, and theme companies have already written negative reviews on the beta version and many have requested it *not* be made part of core, and left as a plugin.

Just my thoughts — you can Google the topic extensively; but upshot – it will be useful if using the twenty-sixteen theme (or free themes included with WP), but for most commercial themes it will likely break stuff and you would be “on your own…” with that.

( I don’t work here. )

So it is not meant to replace the “normal” wordpress editor for posts? Because I understood the discussion like that …

Regards 🙂
Torsten

“The goal of the block editor is to make adding rich content to WordPress simple and enjoyable.

The new post and page building experience will make writing rich posts effortless, making it easy to do what today might take shortcodes, custom HTML, or “mystery meat” embed discovery.

WordPress already supports a large amount of “blocks”, but doesn’t surface them very well, nor does it give them much in the way of layout options. By embracing the blocky nature of rich post content, we will surface the blocks that already exist, as well as provide more advanced layout options for each of them. This will allow you to easily compose beautiful posts like this example.”

This is the official description fro Gutenberg as a plugin (right now). But this plugin is meant to be hardcoded into the core of wordpress. And as YOAST writes in his post (https://yoast.com/gutenberg-alternative-approach/)it should totally kill the existing wordpress editor – and become the “new one”.

This would be more than hard word for any plugin and theme developer. Especially when you take a look into the timeline, when this editor shall be released. For me this sounds like a kind of nightmare …

Best regards
Torsten

• This reply was modified 8 years by 12familyde.

Well, then if that’s the case — I stopped keeping up on it several months back due to the outcry from smart people on how dumb it would be to wreck WP for many folks — it’s theme agnostic, so has no bearing on any specific theme, since with the TDcomposer, it’s designed to build ‘pages’ not ‘posts’ which use the normal WP editor.

Obviously, they do need to do some updates since stupidly they were still doing inline styles for stuff like

<p align="center">

which has been deprecated for couple of years now, and should only be done with CSS classes, not inline styles.

SO, hopefully it will work. You can always install a test site to play with the beta right now if you want. I know somebody who did, disliked it, stopped playing with it since it was so terribly buggy; so I didn’t bother.

Anyway — good discussion to start for those into this stuff 🙂

I personally prefer Bootstrap … but that’s me.

I also don’t follow Yoast, since they are often wrong, and can’t even fix their own plugins half the time. But, that’s also just my own opinion.

The thing is – if I understood this correctly, that things like text-padding, dropcaps, quote-boxes (and so on) would not work anymore like today. I understand that the new editor should completely work with java. All the meta boxes (and the plugins which of course use it today) would be dead.

Wouldn’t this mean, that also built in components (build into the todays wordoress editor)of the newsmag theme would disappear? If this is the case, then nearly 95% of my magazine articles would be broken. At least all those nice styling elements, which I used from within the themes tools … (?)

Well … I of course don’t want to paint a picture full of nightmares 😉 … I just wanted to ask the Tagdiv-Team, if they are aware of Gutenberg, and what people saying about it.

Warmest regards! 🙂
Torsten

• This reply was modified 8 years by 12familyde.

Yeah. I think if they stop using the TinyMCE editor that might cause those issues; which of course will lead people to re-install it as a plugin or something.

So, I wouldn’t worry about it. They can’t justify breaking millions of pages, let alone all the existing wordpress.com ‘hosted’ content!

Much like supporting ooooold php, there would probably be a use case to keep using the old method vs the new one, perhaps via a function or wp-config toggle. Much like one has to register support for bbpress.

I’m sure TagDiv will have an answer if we both stop talking about it 😉

I’m more freaked out by upcoming PHP 7.2 … !

Hello Catalin,

thank you for your reply. But as I understand the discussion within the “wordpress world”, it is planned to insert the Gutenberg-Plugin into the wordpress core. It is – by now – planned to implement it as the core-editor for wordpress 5.0.

So wouldn’t it be absolutely necessary to ensure, that all of your wordpress-themes are absolutely future-compatible with the future of wordpress?

Or do you think, that these core-implementations are only rumours?

Best regards
Torsten

Hello Catalin,

in case we misunderstand each other (maybe because of a language barrier – as my english is not quite perfect):

Automattic (who is – as I understand is – the company behind WordPress) plans to make the Gutenberg Editor (which right now is a plugin) to the official new core edidor for wordepress. So that means, that there will be no other editor left. It will be the one, which is the editor for millions of wordpress users.

As fas as I understand the conversation on the internet, they originally planned this step for WordPress 5.0. But there are some technical things related to licences – so maybe it will last a bit longer …

So (maybe) already from WordPress 5.0 on – there will be dozens of significant changes in wordpress, which (for sure) forces all developers of plugins and themes to completely rewrite their products, for staying compatible with actual WordPress versions. And I am not saying – with a plugin – I am saying with WordPress …

So if your answer still is, that you are not planning to implement it – the I have to understand, that you will stop developing themes for WordPress greater than version 5.0?
This would be very sad news for us all – but still a fair statement, if this is an official hint right now …

I beg for answer – and best regards!
Torsten

I guess the point is, that the theme doesn’t immediately affect the “editor page” in WordPress, aside from the single element which the theme has to show the ‘width’ in WYSIWYG mode. The theme doesn’t ‘change’ the post editor, so if core changes the post editor it doesn’t change the functionality of the theme.

So, nothing to worry about.

Having more options for editing a post, is primarily adding more ‘core CSS’ to WP, it doesn’t necessarily mean all pre-existing CSS stops working.

For instance, shortcodes are a function, not a design element. So, any ‘shortcode’ can always be moved to a personal plugin, or functions file, regardless of theme used. Such as a dropcap, as it’s really just CSS with a “shortcode” to call the CSS in the post. That functionality cannot change, as it’s not “unique” to WordPress, specifically, nor its post editor.

Upshot – nothing to worry about this point.

Again, bigger worries are prep for php 7.2, http/2.

Hey Chris,

thank you very much for this explanation! As I wrote before – I am not really a Tech-Pro – just a user who was searching for a pretty easy way to make a brilliant looking WordPress Magazine… So your few sentences really helped me out.

Sorry for saying this: These few words also could have come from the Tagdiv Stuff. Not just a usual phrase, which I have read a few hundrets of times here …

I am not really into the php topic. But I will try to find some material on it.

Thank you very much – and warmest regards!
Torsten

Sorry my original post wasn’t simpler — I usually am only here, while waiting for something else to finish here that I have to keep eye on so can’t go for a walk; and thus I end up rambling a bit here, and on Facebook 🙂

Nice thing about WP, is that often stuff gets suggested and then there is a heck of a lot of people to provide feedback, and some stuff gets changed. So, some people like the idea of Gutenberg since it gives WP some native layout support to finally become a CMS vs a blogging platform, but others think it breaks the “keep it simple stupid” aspect; I think the CMS folk will win, because of course Automattic wants this for wordpress.com and for paying clients to actually monetize WP further and presumably since they own WooCommerce, they can build hooks to allow for more control there so people don’t have to edit a function, a template override, etc. just to make come stupid columns in Woo.

All very transitional. Much like other nutty stuff like http/2, ipv6, etc.

2018 will be a pretty big year of change on the interwebs.