Does anyone like WordPress’ Gutenberg? Everyday I load Reddit and see at least one new post saying how it’s bad. The reviews for the plugin are not great at all. I still use the WordPress Classic Editor and I know many other people do as well. The problem is that Classic Editor has only been promised until at least 2024. The official word is
Classic Editor is an official WordPress plugin, and will be fully supported and maintained until 2024, or as long as is necessary.
but what does that mean exactly? Does it mean that it will be supported until the majority uses Gutenberg or until it becomes too expensive to maintain and thus deemed unnecessary?
Gutenberg is named after the inventor Johannes Gutenberg who created the original movable-type printing press. Arranging blocks on the printing press and pressing the ink covered blocks down on paper, allowed multiple copies of pages to be created in a short amount of time, thus making books more widely available to people. Its invention lead to mass spread literature throughout Europe. Unfortunately, WordPress’ Gutenberg does not have the same level of impact.
Guttenberg’s printing press (like the one shown above) made books more common, thus leading to mass spread literature throughout Europe.
I do not have a lot of experience with Gutenberg personally. I tried it when it came out and didn’t find it to be intuitive so I went back to Classic Editor. I recently had to add a contact form for a site that uses Gutenberg and it still was not intuitive. It took me longer than it should have to figure out how to add a block. Considering it’s supposed to be a block editor, you’d think adding blocks would be fast and easy and could be saved for use elsewhere, but I didn’t find that to be the case at all. While Classic Editor is not going to reach the end of life on December 31, it does seem that Automattic has plans to sunset it at some point.
While I hate the idea of leaving Classic Editor and I will be leaving it on LepsLair and my other existing sites for as long as possible (and making my own Classic Editor plugin if possible and necessary) I think going forward, new sites I create will be in Gutenberg. It also means that any future WordPress tutorials that I create will have a Gutenberg and Classic Editor version, if necessary. There are a few tutorials that I have wanted to write, but it would be different for both and while I know of how to do it in Classic Editor, I think the most value would be for it to be for both Classic and Gutenberg. The future of WordPress is Gutenberg and I suppose it is time for me to start learning and embracing it, unfortunately.
