Gutenberg Verdict – Bad for Writers, Good for Developers

Have you ever tried to do Gardening with a kitchen knife,believe me, it is hard.I have been trying to do it for many days.

If you don’t have the right tools to dig, cut, and water, the plants it is tiring job.

Something similar has happened to WordPress.

In this Post we will explore – Is Gutenberg Good or Bad? – Should You Switch to the new WordPress Block Editor? – Pros and Cons for Gutenberg, Comparison with Classic Editor.

WordPress has changed the default classic editor to a new block based system, and it is almost two years since this change was first introduced to the community.

Still millions of users are not using the feature and asking the developers to switch back to the old classic editor. 

Notably, 5 million+ users have installed the Classic Editor plugin.

There are valid reasons to use the classic editor for a lot of users, and it is tough to make the switch to the new Gutenberg Editor. 

If you read the feedback about whether you should switch to Gutenberg. You will get confused. Some people love it, and others hate it.

I have been using WordPress for the last 6 years and it is the most amazing content creation platform uptill this major change.  

I will tell you why some people like it and others are hating it. In the end, none of them are entirely wrong. 

Let’s consider WordPress developers as a company that make tools.

They launched their new Kitchen tools (Gutenberg), which are excellent, better than what they have ever made in the past. The company is proud of these new tools and want everyone to use them.  

But there is a problem. 

Half their customers work in the kitchen and love the new tools, but the other half are gardeners.

The gardners need gardening tools.

WordPress is telling the Gardners to use the kitchen tools and adapt to them.

The company has worked hard and spent time and money to develop new tools, and thinks everybody should use them. 

No, but they are bad for Gardening. The company doesn’t care. 

Gutenberg is a new kitchen tool from the company (WordPress).  

The people working in the Kitchen are Developers who love these new tools.

Gardeners are writers who want to just write and publish many new articles daily without being bothered about fancy boxes and designs. 

Gutenberg – What’s Good and Why To Use it?

Gutenberg comes with a blocks system that offers a lot more versatility and creative design choices than the classic editor.

The cherry on the cake is that you don’t need to touch any code. 

You can create fancy boxes, images, add colors to backgrounds, embed videos, Gifs, and do alot more stuff that was impossible to accomplish earlier.

It is easy to create pages, even with the ability to import pre-made templates and customize them as per your need. 

Does it make the work of developers creating new websites for the clients easy? I bet it does—no need to waste time writing CSS and optimizing it for different devices. 

Gutenberg is an out of the box for developers, and even for some of the content creators. It is ideal for creating some fancy pages. 

So what’s the problem? Let me tell you.

Gutenberg – The Bad and Why People Hate it?

Gutenberg is a big mess for writers looking to publish many articles every day.

Most writers are not concerned with fancy designs. The focus is to keep readers engaged with useful information and gripping writing.

Here are some of the problems that writers may have with the Gutenberg Blocks system: 

1. Blocks are a distraction. Break the writing flow, and impact the quality of writing that you want to deliver to your audience.
2. It is hard to quickly create headings and bullet lists using keyboard shortcuts – it requires too many mouse clicks for everything. 
3. Blocks are clunky and slow to move, hard to format, and it is difficult to edit content.
4. Adding new images, hyperlinks, and adding attributes like no-follow takes time. Everything needs more clicks. 
5. For very long articles having a large number of blocks, the post editor itself starts to hang, and the experience becomes sluggish. 
6. Several blocks are not compatible with AMP (especially block plugins) that degrades the user experience and is another pain to fix for many users. 
7. Blocks don’t work smoothly with software like Grammarly that is essential for writers. 
8. Jumping from one block to another is unintuitive even when you are editing a copy. 
9. When you want to cut or select paragraphs, the blocks make it cumbersome.
10. You can’t upload multiple images in a post. It was doable in the classic editor.
11. Overall, blocks don’t offer a smooth writing and content creation experience. 

Alot of people like me who publish between 4-6 articles a day need a more efficient and fast content publishing system.

I am afraid Gutenberg is not that. People who have are not used to the classic editor can use Gutenberg and live with the slow editing process; as they are not aware of how fast was the classic editor.

But once you are used to the faster content writing and publishing experience of the classic editor, it is tough to switch to the Gutenberg. 

As I said, you can’t do Gardening with kitchen tools. 

Way Forward

WordPress could have made Gutenberg as an add-on and let it live inside the classic editor. Those who wanted fancy blocks can add them, and those who want to write with the faster flow can do that.

It could have been a win-win. I hope the WordPress development team will work based on the feedback from millions of users and improve the experience.

Probably, Johannes Gutenberg himself maynot have liked this over complicated approach to publishing content.

People are moving to minimalism and simplicity to keep a higher focus – Gutenberg is an exact opposite.

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