Wordpress 5.0 & Gutenberg is here + Classic Editor Plugin already doomed...

[Ryuzaki]

I'm sure you all noticed that Wordpress 5.0 was ready to be installed in your websites. I also hope you didn't have a hair trigger and click it without realizing it was Gutenberg time.

Twas only ~14 months ago when I soothsayer'd this thread: Wordpress 5.0 - The Incoming 'Gutenberg' Disaster, alerting the all the other chickadees that the sky was falling. It has fallen.

Wordpress 5.0 is here and Gutenberg has been thrusted upon the masses (mostly unknowingly and unwillingly). Sites are already broken, plugins are already broken, clients are already pissed, and I'm still whining.

The Near Future
I'm here to continue to predict the future:

• Many themes will be abandoned and never made Gutenberg ready
• Even more plugins will be abandoned, especially if they concerned themselves with custom fields, meta boxes, or extending the text editor
• Billions in man-hours and revenue will be lost as workflows are recreated and Gutenberg is learned
• Lots of freelance money will be earned from fixing sites where people clicked "Update to 5.0" in a hurry
• Clients will request to be updated, forewarned about the new experience, then request to be rolled back to Wordpress 4.9

Long Live The Classic Editor Plugin?
Regarding that last bullet point, there is a solution. Wordpress is offering the Classic Editor plugin! This will add the classic editor that we all know and love as an option when you create a new post. You can choose the Block Editor or the Classic Editor.

Thank god, right? Because otherwise Wordpress just shafted 100's of millions of people. Because what happens when you update to Wordpress 5.0 without first installing the Classic Editor plugin is all of your old posts are stuffed into an "HTML Block." So they're still there, but now you can only edit it with raw HTML, and it's going to be wrapped in an extra <div> or two just for the sake of stating it's an HTML block.

At least they're supporting the Classic Editor. They'd have to be on a suicide mission to not have offered that. Who can be expected to go back through 100's or 1000's or even a million posts and reformat them all? Not so fast... Wordpress already announced that they will stop supporting the Classic Editor Plugin on December 31st, 2021.

That's pure insanity, but hey, as all of the Stockholm Syndrome'd users out there are saying, "at least they gave us a 2 year heads up."

What does this really mean? It means you have a few options:

• Don't update past Wordpress 4.9, hope your plugins have no vulnerabilities, and keep installing the security patches Wordpress will continue to provide for old versions.
• Update Wordpress until 12/31/21 and then stop and refer to the first bullet point.
• You start using ClassicPress instead of Wordpress, which is a fork of Wordpress pre-Gutenberg that will keep being security patched.
• Keep updating because someone smart is going to take the open source Classic Editor plugin and keep supporting it, and if they're really smart they'll charge $50 a pop for it. (But will other plugins keep supporting the Classic Editor plugin?)

Wordpress' official statement regarding the Classic Editor plugin is basically, and I paraphrase, "this is just to help you transition to the Block Editor, we're under no obligation to keep the Classic Editor working for you, be happy we're giving you two years. Also, we're also going to fuck up your custom post types and meta boxes too."

It's truly a slap in the face against all of the people in the open source community and other developers that have made Wordpress the success it is. But hey, Wix must be gaining too much ground on them, and all of these Beaver Builder and Thrive Visual Editor guys are making too much money. I'm just being salty, but I also don't understand how going back to the early 1990's to WYSIWYG editors is a good thing.

It's Not Just Me
It's not just everyone bitching. Even the two top Wordpress theme developers have the exact same sentiments:

^ Advanced Custom Fields ^​

^ Yoast SEO ^
​

Read that ACF screenshot at the top. Wordpress slapped all of us in the face, from customers to users to developers.

What You Should Do Before Updating to Wordpress 5.0
Don't be lazy. Make a backup of your site first. Then take that backup and use it to create a copy of your site on a local or staging server online. Then install the Classic Editor plugin and update all of your other plugins first. Then you should upgrade to Wordpress 5.0 and start browsing your various content templates and make sure everything survived.

Then, if you're brave, you should disable the Classic Editor plugin and browse again and see what the destruction is. Some people have reported that not having the Classic Editor plugin live altered their posts permanently, because Gutenberg tries to understand the "type" of content in the post and move it into blocks. Like it moves paragraphs into paragraph blocks, shortcodes into shortcode blocks, etc. That's why you're doing this on a staging server and have a backup too.

I'll flat out tell you, I haven't done this yet. I have the same complaint everyone else has, which is that I'm not ready yet. I have too much other shit going on.

Have you tried it yet?

 

[SmokeTree]

Haven't tried it yet but I have a client that has quite a few sites and they are thinking about it. Of course I'll have proper backups in place but not really looking forward to pulling the trigger on this or wading through the aftermath, especially considering WordPress's history of security issues and changes that break just about everything. To be honest, I'm trying to get this guy to move a couple of his smaller sites to Hugo (https://gohugo.io/). The more folks rely on "just works", the harder the fall when things break.

 

[Calamari]

Did anyone abandoned wordpress all together because of this mess?

Most of the sites I care about are off wordpress and are strictly html now.

 

[turbin3]

I hate that small business owners and marketers are being subjected to this pain. That said, I am loving some of what I consider to be the mistakes Matt and the WP team are making. I'm hoping it will just push that many more off of that steaming pile.

There's been some surprisingly junior-level "business" mistakes with Gutenberg and WP core. The latest is the announcement of the WP 5.0 launch for example.

Announced on Dec. 3rd...

that it would be released Dec. 6th., coincidentally, we are told, just in time for the Wordcamp US conference Dec. 7-9th. Again, merely a coincidence we are told. (yeah right)

Yes, you read that right. The CMS that has some 30% of the web just decided to spring a major version release (aka gonna be breaking changes) on developers just THREE days before launch. Compounded by the fact that it was just FOUR days before the major conference many devs were going to be at. I expect that from startups, not seasoned core teams with aged and well-adopted products.

So far, for my few remaining WP sites, and the few others I'm involved with, I'm extremely happy that I made the move to the Studiopress Genesis framework a couple years ago, and stuck with core Studiopress developed themes. It's been the most pain-free experience I've had in dealing with updates and major changes. That said, most of the sites I'm running are light on plugins, content-focused, and don't have any crazy, custom functionality going on.

There is a light amongst the darkness, however. IMO, I think the "serverless" phenomenon (a misnomer to be sure) has been a positive force in pulling more and more demographics out of the death grip of Wordpress. In essence, largely static sites that are beginning to add more and more dynamic functionality through "cloud" services (AWS Lambda, Google's various options, etc.).

After all, when you think about it, for the average Wordpress site, just how much overkill is it using a database-backed CMS that has all of the management overhead and lack of security all of that implies. Most of us just need pre-generated content pages, maybe some ad placements, form submissions.

There are some seriously good static site generators available these days. You can check out your options over on StaticGen. I've found my home with Hugo, but there are many other great ones depending on your needs, preferences, preferred programming language, etc.

 

[Joozed]

Me also moved to strictly html for my most important sites. Way easier for me to edit in combination with Laravel framework, and so much faster.

 

[Jared]

I went ahead and bit the bullet and made the switch with both of my sites. Neither is particularly large or complex, so the risk was minimal. Worst-case scenario, I'd either revert to 4.9 or spend an afternoon copy-and-pasting to rebuild posts and pages. No biggie.

So far, so good.

No formatting issues. No plugin errors (I have probably 20 unique plugins activated between the two sites). All of my posts fit into the neat, clean visual editor, which looks and runs much smoother than the old visual editor.

Searching around, issues seem to be few and far between, with most "issues" being people (predictably) bitching over new things.

Does anyone know of any actual Wordpress 5.0 horror stories, not just hypothetical ones? Because right now, I'm getting strong Y2K vibes from the whole situation. The worry over the situation seems to be a lot worse than the actual situation.

 

[mmm91492]

Does anyone know of any actual Wordpress 5.0 horror stories, not just hypothetical ones? Because right now, I'm getting strong Y2K vibes from the whole situation. The worry over the situation seems to be a lot worse than the actual situation.

I've done two so far, pretty pain free. One was using Visual Composer and Gutenberg obviously breaks the in-editor view (not their proprietary front end editor though, I assume this is the same with other page builders), but installing Classic Editor after the fact solved the issue.

I haven't run into any of the formatting issues mentioned above.

 

[mikey3times]

I just got an email saying that my site was automatically updated. Oops. I guess I have the automatic update feature enabled. Warning to everyone else.

So, I guess we’ll see how it goes. I might be reworking a lot over the holdidays. I also upgraded Contact Forms 7 and now I have a recaptch badge on every page of my site.

I’m thankful my site is so new.

@Ryuzaki, any concerns about BuSo Lightning with 5.0 or Gutenberg? I might be building my own theme.

 

[DarkRed]

The automatic update was for version 4.9.9 not 5.0

 

[mikey3times]

It did not auto update me to 5.0. Instead, I jumped straight to 5.0.1. I was very careful to ignore the Dashboard request to upgrade to 5.0. Oh well. Damage done.

 

[Ryuzaki]

@Ryuzaki, any concerns about BuSo Lightning with 5.0 or Gutenberg? I might be building my own theme.

That's weird about automatic updating. Mine did not make the leap to 5.0.

But regarding BuSo Lightning, the only issue with it is that it won't have any styling for the new Gutenberg Blocks. But they come with their own styling to a certain degree, which essentially means Lightning is ready because I'd just slap a generic styling on it anyways. It is up to the user of Lightning to create a full web design out of the theme.

Sadly enough I've only seen a handful of people actually do that and not simply install it and use it as is. I'll likely return to it and update it for Gutenberg though, creating some stylings for the blocks in the CSS file to help guide users so they can alter those stylings instead of trying to figure out what to style on their own. But that's not coming any time soon due to the amount of work I have going on.

 

[DarkRed]

It did not auto update me to 5.0. Instead, I jumped straight to 5.0.1. I was very careful to ignore the Dashboard request to upgrade to 5.0. Oh well. Damage done.

I'm guessing it was your managed hosting

 

[mikey3times]

I'm guessing it was your managed hosting

Yes, this was the case. My host uses Softaculous and the default setting was to automatically install both minor and major updates. I changed it to minor updates only.

 

[mikey3times]

So, I think I am going to make the leap to Guttenberg on my new site. I'm a Joomla guy, but my newest site is on Wordpress since I wanted to develop something that can be easily sold (if I decide to one day).
Sadly, going this route will REQUIRE significant time editing each article to convert everything to blocks. I only have 20 or so articles so this is doable. If you have a massive site then this probably doesn't apply.

Here is my thought process...

I think the typical "sidebar" layout is doomed. It is a relic of a time before mobile. It works fine for desktops and landscape-tablets, but it sucks on phones. We spend a lot of time browsing on phones. Mobile first is my preference for how to design, but I actually design both mobile and desktop in tandem. I hate generic sidebars. HATE. Sidebars should be created specifically for that article. And relegating all of your sidebar content to the bottom of the article on mobile is terrible.

In rethinking my site, Gettenberg makes sense from a mobile-first flow. It is also much easier for other people to handle layout if it ever grows to the point where I have writers and editors working inside WP.

It seems to me that almost all content can be added in Guttenberg as part of the block layouts. I have a sidebar plugin that requires me to write the content, then go and add sidebar content that applies to that specific article and link it to the specific post. Now I have TONS of individual sidebars since they are customized per article.

So now, I am thinking I can use CSS Grid layouts and custom Guttenberg blocks. I write the content as I normally would and I include the sidebar content in places that make sense for the flow on mobile. Then my stylesheet pulls those "sidebars" out of the flow for desktop or tablet, like so...

So in the Guttenberg editor, I build it like the left diagram (Mobile Layout) and let CSS do its magic on the right diagram. The green and pink blocks are customized with built-in CSS that lets the CSS grid do its thing. You can even interweave the Helper Links into the content where it makes sense, but then pull them out into a larger group for desktop.

Full disclosure, I am NOT a developer. I'm more of a front-end designer, but I wouldn't even put that on my resume. I am a hack that can cobble examples from the internet together to make my site do what it needs to. Most of you would cringe at my CSS and HTML. I can't even claim to know how to write PHP. I'm sure what I am describing above can be done with the classic editor, but I think Guttenberg makes it easier for writers, editors, etc.

It seems to me that if you are starting something new, you should be going with the new editor.

I hope this spurs some conversation.

 

[mmm91492]

I write the content as I normally would and I include the sidebar content in places that make sense for the flow on mobile. Then my stylesheet pulls those "sidebars" out of the flow for desktop or tablet, like so...

I'm doing something similar - above my tablet breakpoint, all my content is pulled right and images, CTA's, etc are absolutely positioned left, taking them out of the original flow, leaving evenly spaced text on the right and graphics on the left. It's actually helpful for making sure each post has enough additional media, as long breaks between items on the left are very noticeable. I also have an additional full width class for especially important CTA's.

 

[doublethinker]

Put on your thin foil hats ladies and gentlemen! I've been away for a good while, and I hope I'm not too late in the Gutenberg conversation!

From WordPress 5.0 & Gutenberg is here... Why would WordPress effect a major release within 3 days of announcement? I agree with WordPress that it is a coincidence, and a red herring over the real reason.

WordPress doesn't generate any revenue out of the open source community, that is out of the small business owner, the internet marketer that uses WordPress.org's software for free.

You see where I'm going here? WordPress.com is a lucrative business model, where they host, maintain and develop for major publication like Variety, The Sun, Time, New York Post, TED, USA Today and many more.

I don't know the price structure that WordPress has, but it wouldn't be a stretch to imagine number of visits would be a factor, just like every other WordPress managed service.

Now, what would be the easy way for WordPress.com to keep their VIP customers happy and generate more revenue?

By breaking the internet of course! Quick and sudden major release, incomplete documentation and insufficient time for the ecosystem to adapt. That is the surest way to render a site offline, or devalue a sites page rank that a major competitor would benefit from, one that WordPress might (and would likely) be a provider for. WordPress CMSes are used in 30% of the internet. How many of these sites have overlapping or competing in the same domain or niche as a major publication? All of them.

I'm not saying this is actually happening, and I don't come with support evidence. Not yet. I'm just vacationing on my phone right now as I tap away. But management decisions like these don't just happen on the fly. They are considered and deliberate. To say we simply wanted to release for an upcoming event is and always an easy excuse to distract from the priorities of a revenue generating organisation, which is generating more revenue.

@Ryuzaki "Wordpress just shafted 100's of millions of people." But it gained billions more in page views for it's VIP customers.

It's time to stop talking about WordPress as that free open source CMS that's annoying to sit with like meeting your in-laws at Christmas. It's time to start talking about WordPress like they're the enemy.

 

[darkzerothree]

Looking at gravCMS going forward.

The client sites are going to be shit, though. No way to move out of WP in the near future.

 

[CCarter]

Massive Bug for Wordpress 5.0 (Wordpress 4.x impacted as well)

A massive bug that can potentially allow Google to index your passwords and email address of your wordpress accounts was discovered in 5.0 - as well as 4.x versions:

WordPress 5.0 users are being urged to update their CMS software to fix a number of serious bugs. The update (WordPress 5.0.1) addresses seven flaws and was issued Thursday, less than a week after WordPress 5.0 was released.

...

Wordfence said all WordPress users running versions of the 4.x branch of WordPress core are also impacted by similar issues. It urges those 4.x users, not ready to update to the 5.0 branch, to install the WordPress 4.9.9 security update (also released this week), which addresses similar bugs.​

Sauce: https://threatpost.com/wordpress-5-0-patched-to-fix-serious-bugs/139948/

--

I told ya'll a long time ago about that Wordpress stuff... It's only going to get worse. I went Pico and never looked back. There is Hugo and a ton of other flat-file CMS as alternatives. "Wordpress is on a downward slope". The reality is the "good ole days" are over for WP, and they've got to make bank, and that means catering towards the non-developer, non-programmer, non-internet people to make more money.

 

[built]

@CCarter, Have you had any success with flat-file CMS's and magazine type sites?

 

[mikey3times]

Have you had any success with flat-file CMS's and magazine type sites?

And how do you select one that will continue development?

Is anyone doing complex review sites with multiple taxonomies and other setups that a database is helpful for?

 

[SmokeTree]

I don't know anything about Pico but I've worked with Hugo for a couple of years and find it to be fantastic. As far as taxonomies go, Hugo has a pretty nice taxonomy system. From looking at the github for both Pico and Hugo, I see signs of recent development.

As for anything that requires the use of a database and/or dynamic functionality, there's always the option of using a JavaScript/API approach and I've seen a way to incorporate PHP files into Hugo, although I've never done this myself.

 

[Calamari]

Is anyone doing complex review sites with multiple taxonomies and other setups that a database is helpful for?

A database isn't required no matter how complex a review site is. Honestly, nothing I have personally built absolutely requires a database.

I use Hugo and have way more control over all facets of the taxonomies than I do with wordpress.

 

[turbin3]

Now, what would be the easy way for WordPress.com to keep their VIP customers happy and generate more revenue?

By breaking the internet of course! Quick and sudden major release, incomplete documentation and insufficient time for the ecosystem to adapt. That is the surest way to render a site offline, or devalue a sites page rank that a major competitor would benefit from, one that WordPress might (and would likely) be a provider for. WordPress CMSes are used in 30% of the internet. How many of these sites have overlapping or competing in the same domain or niche as a major publication? All of them.

I'm not gonna totally exclude that possibility, though I kind of doubt that's the case. If it was, I'd wonder what number of local, state, federal, and international laws they might potentially be violating by performing such a predatory practice.

No, if you look at the history of Gutenberg development, I doubt it. The consistent behavior that's stood out to me is as I mentioned before. Junior-level developer behavior. I don't say that to denigrate the core devs that do know what they're doing and have put massive effort into it.

Maybe it's a top-down leadership issue. Regardless, it's been a consistent pattern of ignoring large swaths of industry feedback and complaints, not having clear timelines, and not having a clear and public vision that people could get behind early. The best I can tell, this whole thing has basically been living in Matt Mullenweg's mind, and the vast majority of the industry has just had to sit back and hold their breath to see what that vision actually is.

It's time to start talking about WordPress like they're the enemy.

I like the way you think. ;-)

I told ya'll a long time ago about that Wordpress stuff... It's only going to get worse. I went Pico and never looked back. There is Hugo and a ton of other flat-file CMS as alternatives. "Wordpress is on a downward slope". The reality is the "good ole days" are over for WP, and they've got to make bank, and that means catering towards the non-developer, non-programmer, non-internet people to make more money.

That is the damn truth!

Bros and Bro-ettes, I've said this before, but I'm gonna start saying it more now. For most of the typical website needs a lot of us have, static sites are the answer to most of your problems.

This won't apply to everyone. For some, maybe "the exit" is part of your business plan, in which case you probably have to stick with Wordpress due to the ease of selling something built on common tech.

For people that have no intent of selling, and that can write a bit of HTML and CSS, honestly static sites will do what you need. Blogs. Affiliate sites. Magazine sites. Just think about a shining example of a brand with any of those types of sites. Now think about what the majority of those types of sites are. It's largely static content. Some JS for serving ads and possibly changing behavior between certain page types. That's just not that big of a deal. At least not to the point where you actually need a traditional server, CMS, SQL database, and all the baggage that comes with it.

 

[Ryuzaki]

So, some time has passed and I've had a chance to play with the Block Editor a bit, upgrade a handful of sites to Wordpress 5.0, and even work on customizing the Block Editor fairly extensively. I wanted to update my opinion on Gutenberg at this point and put my thoughts out there so they can possibly help anyone else out wondering about the future of their project on the Wordpress platform.

They Rushed 5.0 Big Time
Between the quotes above and the big security bugs and everything else, it became clear that shareholders or someone was saying 'get this out before our next big conference' and they did, busted and broken.

​

I saw that several times yesterday and it would make me chuckle the first time, then made me sigh in disbelief another time, then just shrug it off with indifference. It was irresponsible to push this out with nearly no documentation to help out plugin creators, theme makers, and developers. So not only was Gutenberg itself massively broken, but so was any plugin dealing with the edit screen and every theme has some amount of issues too to some degree.

But enough time has passed for everyone to scramble and get it together.

The Block Editor Interface
At first I was appalled. I didn't like it. It frustrated me. Then I went back to the Classic Editor and that really changed my view fundamentally. The Classic Editor sucks. It really does. We were all used to it and understood our workflows. But at the end of the day that thing sucks. The Block Editor's interface isn't perfect but it truly has made certain things easier to find and simpler to use.

And it doesn't get filtered through wptexturize or whatever it is that constantly scrambles your HTML and screws up pretty quotes and everything else.

The biggest hurdle they have is organization. Shit is everywhere, hidden in menus, sidebars, dropdowns... just like the Classic Editor, you'll have to learn where stuff is hidden in the Block Editor before your workflow really moves.

Another issue I still haven't quite worked out is inserting blocks at specific points in posts, moving them around, copy & pasting them, etc. It just seems unpredictable in what it will do, all based on you clicking on some invisible part of some padding of an invisible block. Sometimes you get the innards, sometimes you get the block itself. And each has the same lil icons and buttons that appear but do different things. I'm sure this will get worked out, but it should have been done before it was launched.

Customizing the Block Editor Itself
Here's the worst part of the whole thing. The documentation might as well not exist. Most of it is missing, and what's there is incorrect. It was written and then the Block Editor was fundamentally changed in a lot of ways.

That led me to Google where one guy customized the editor in a completely incorrect way and two other guys rewrote his blog post and followed his advice. So now all of the ranking and existing advice is incorrect. I found out the correct way of doing this and it honestly surprised me. Wordpress did a great job with this, but they need to tell people how it's done. I'm not going to share because it would take forever to write their documentation for them.

But the key thing is, unlike the Classic Editor, the Block Editor does not exist in an iFrame. That means if you start trying to style the Block Editor to actually resemble the front end of your site (the entire reason it exists) you will break everything. You'll start styling the backend dashboard too. So what's the solution? It's NOT to manually enqueue a style sheet and it's not to target the block's HTML themselves either. Wordpress created a slicker way. Maybe you can find it. But even in that slicker way there's still some stuff you have to screw around to get working.

It's got a long way to go but it's tolerable once you're on the right track. My guess is theme developers and site developers aren't even going to take the time to do this, and I don't blame them. I'm taking the time and it's a nightmare because in a lot of ways you have to design most of your site twice.

The best thing about the Block Editor is the ability to start disabling parts of it for your clients or yourself.

Custom Blocks & Meta Boxes & Shortcodes
Adding new custom blocks is a complete nightmare right now. The number of people qualified to even attempt it is very few and the number that will succeed is even fewer. Advanced Custom Fields brought everything back to PHP, thank the lord.

Custom Blocks are going to be the bee's knees, truly. I already do a lot with Meta Boxes on the old Wordpress, and the current mantra is "convert all meta boxes and shortcodes to custom blocks." This is honestly exciting for anyone with the skill level to set it up, even if done with the help of ACF or something similar.

The problem is, some of the design stuff is impossible to do with custom blocks due to the complexity. And also there's plenty of things you still need custom fields and meta boxes for, such as hot swapping prices and links around your site in one shot. Let's hope they don't kill those features off. For now, Meta Boxes are still in effect, and in my mind are a must that can't ever go away. But for everything else, Custom Blocks are going to be extremely fun, though for clients it's still probably better to build features into the templates and inject data through Meta Boxes.

The Block CSS
This is frigging stupid. So Wordpress HAD to roll out some CSS for everyone to use with the new blocks. But this meant loading another CSS file sitewide. And for some retarded ass reason, they split the Block CSS in two. One file loads automatically and another you have to opt in to use on the front end but it is automatically applied on the back end. Stupid, stupid, stupid.

The other problem is they had to assume your site had specific media query break points. The chances that your site uses the same break points they used for these blocks is zero percent. That means that as you start styling these blocks (because they're own styles do not cut it at all) you not only have to apply your break points but you have to override and UNDO their stupid break points. Once you get it right on the front end, you get to do it again for the back end, but this time you get to override their 2nd CSS file that you didn't opt in for because you didn't want 2 new global CSS files loading.

Could you take their CSS and roll it into your own main CSS file? Sure, but they'll likely change it, add to it, subtract from it every update. So now we all get another global CSS file to deal with, if not two, or create a lot of extra work in copying and pasting it all during each update.

Their stuff like "up to 6 columns" is ridiculously not useful at all. And then you can stack blocks inside those columns, kind of nested. The amount of possible nested blocks are already almost infinite, meaning no developer can possibly deal with those up front. There will be a lot of clients trying to do fancy shit and a lot of emails and phone calls going around for dumb things like "I put an image in a blockquote inside of the 2nd column, and it doesn't look good."

Their Big Picture Idea is a Catastrophe
I watched a video from a conference where one of the Gutenberg team members talked about their next big plan for this Block Editor, which is to make it completely compatible with the Customizer. Their goal, despite saying they just wanted better content editing, is to create a WYSIWYG site builder experience.

They don't want you just creating content. They want people to be able to fully design their sites. They want you making pages that you can assign as the homepage. They want you to be able to mess with the header and footer and sidebars. It's going to get ugly. The web is about to get real ugly. This is likely going to make sidebars fall out of favor to a degree too. They're jocking Medium and Wix and Squarespace so hard they aren't even coming up for breath. Fear is making them do some really stupid stuff.

I imagine theme developers on places like Theme Forest are going to start offering vastly simpler web designs just because the workload has doubled or tripled for the same results. Wordpress sites are going to:

• 1) look good but simple thanks to premade themes
• 2) look horrible thanks to users trying to do stupid things in the editor and customizer
• 3) look great because real developers are hired that heavily constrict what the client can mess up

One thing they want to do that'll be good is create post templates with certain blocks frozen into place so your clients or yourself don't have to keep rebuilding the same post styles over and over again. They can just choose "review template" and fill out most of it since the blocks will appear and in the right order.

The Path Forward
So they say they'll support the Classic Editor till the end of 2020 and then "re-evaluate the need" meaning that the inevitable is that they'll stop supporting it, probably at the end of 2020.

The hope was that some other company will pick up the Classic Editor and keep supporting it, but Wordpress has made it clear that the workload will be too much to continue to support the infrastructure needed to use it. That means they'll ultimately sabotage the ability for anyone to keep up with the Classic Editor, which means it's definitely going to go extinct eventually.

So the question becomes, is the Block Editor going to be okay enough? Yeah, it probably will. The important plugin developers are already on the ball making life easier where Wordpress failed us. I think Wordpress screwed the pooch on their own fundamental philosophies, but some of the holy grail plugin guys are fixing that for the rest of us.

By sheer will power, Wordpress will force the mass adoption of the Block Editor, and because they already own such a huge chunk of the web as it is as a platform, it's not going away. The Classic Editor will be the thing that goes away.

Right now, if you want to stay with Wordpress because:

• You want to sell your site eventually
• It's a client site and you can't change
• You have a million posts already

You have some choices. First thing to do is install the Classic Editor plugin and enable it. Then make sure all of your other plugins are 5.0 ready and update them. Then update Wordpress to 5.0.3. Everything will remain intact. You'll have to update your theme and hope the theme developers were gracious enough to go back and style all these blocks for you. Your best move is to not use the crazy blocks. Just stick with paragraphs, images, quotes, buttons, etc. Leave tables, columns, galleries, and the rest of the hokey shit alone, because most of that isn't even ready for responsive design.

After that, you can edit content with the Classic Editor, but if you look at it in the Block Editor you'll see your entire post is shoved into a "Classic Block". If you click on the "..." icon on the right you can "Convert to Blocks." This will get most of it done for you but will screw up a lot too.

Any custom CSS applied to images and whatever is going to get lost too. And a lot of your CSS is going to break because of the way the HTML renders for these new blocks. Names changed, orders of nested div's changed, etc. There will be a period of time where you have to fix a lot of stuff.

So if you're going to move forward, you're better off starting to build new posts in the Block Editor, discover the bad CSS and fix it. And then as you start converting old posts into the new block style, most of the CSS will be fixed, but you'll still find more surprises. But better to not keep accumulating old Classic Editor posts at this point. Make Block posts and start converting X per day until you're done.

That's a nightmare, but what I intend to do. I'm a typical late adopter, but this time I'm going to bite the wienie and go ahead and get it done. I see good things ahead for Gutenberg, as well as some really bad stuff coming too (like the Customizer nonsense). Developers, I recommend you do the same thing we did with the Customizer... (don't use it). Reject a lot of these blocks and stick to the fundamentals. Disable a bunch of stuff, and maybe we'll even figure out how to disable certain blocks too. I'm already disabling and overriding color palettes and text sizes and stuff. I'm sure Wordpress will create the hooks for it eventually.

That's my thoughts. The Block Editor is here to stay and it's not that bad. If the typical user can not be a complete idiot, they'll have a good time with it. Developers have a lot of work ahead of them, and a big solution is going to be to constrict the ability of the normal user from destroying their own posts and blaming you for it. Charge by the hour and tell them to stop doing dumb stuff.

,
Ryuzaki

 

[DarkRed]

Why not disable all the CSS that comes with the blocks and make your own custom css.

/*
 * Remove the `wp-block-library.css` file from `wp_head()`
 *
 * @author Rahul Arora
 * @since  12182018
 * @uses   wp_dequeue_style
 */
add_action( 'wp_enqueue_scripts', function() {
  wp_dequeue_style( 'wp-block-library' );
} );

Via https://wpcrux.com/blog/remove-gutenberg-enqueued-css/