Something new is coming to WordPress and people have mixed reviews about it. While some are ready to give it a chance most of the people are against the idea. Yes, we are talking about the new WordPress environment, Gutenberg. The impact that this change will have on WordPress will be huge. Let us look at Gutenberg in detail.
What is Gutenberg?
Gutenberg is the new editor for WordPress and it is the new way in which content will be edited on the site. This editor is a replacement to TinyMCE post content editor and is better than that in many ways. The editor is currently under development as a feature plugin on GitHub but it will be incorporated into the core of WordPress in the next version. It is a client-side interface and uses blocks to create content. One of the great things about Gutenberg is the fact that it reduces the difference between how content is crafted and how it is rendered on the front end.
Named after Johannes Gutenberg, the inventor of movable type printing press, the main goal of this editor is to make it easier for people to use the site. By introducing blocks for every type of content, they have made things easier for clients. The blocks are available for, but not limited to, paragraphs, codes, lists, quotes, images, galleries, columns, buttons, widgets and a lot of other things.
Despite all the new and additional features people are still unsure about the decision to embed this into the core of WordPress rather than just offering it as a plugin. A lot of users are of the view that this update goes against the core philosophy of WordPress which is “Design for Majority”. According to WordPress “Many end users of WordPress are non-technically minded. They don’t know what AJAX is, nor do they care about which version of PHP they are using. The average WordPress user simply wants to be able to write without problems or interruption”. However, this will not be the case once Gutenberg becomes the main editor for the website. To better understand the situation, we will look at the pros and cons of Gutenberg.
Pros of Gutenberg:
Gutenberg is without any doubt a very powerful software and holds a lot of potentials. One of the great things about Gutenberg is that it gives a much-needed relief from the dependency on TinyMCE. As a result, the interaction and communication between core, theme developer, editor, and plugins are significantly improved. Gutenberg provides a Medium styled editing experience which most of the newer publishers will absolutely love. The whole experience of using Gutenberg is less distracting and gives more space and freedom to the users to work. Blocks are not only easy to work they also provide users with a new alignment that allows them to create higher resolution and more interactive websites.
One of the best features of Gutenberg is that it works great on mobile phone devices. This feature especially comes in handy if you want to make a quick edit on the website on the go. The mobile phone will further improve with time but it already a great step forward. Another amazing capability of Gutenberg is that it allows theme and plugin developers to create their own custom blocks. For the people who are just beginning to work on WordPress, this editor will be a great help as they will have an idea about what the website will actually look like once it is completed as compared to the old layout in which non-experienced developers had no idea how the actual website will look like.
Cons of Gutenberg:
Just like every product in its development phase Gutenberg also has some cons. We hope that the developers will work on improving these cons in the future. The editor is currently missing Markdown support which will be considered a negative point by many users. Although the editor is easier to be used by beginners some people will still find it hard to get used to especially the ones that have been using WordPress for a while now. One of the main reasons that users install visual builder plugins is to get a responsive column feature, however, Gutenberg does not yet support the responsive column feature.
Conclusion:
Gutenberg is without any doubt a great software with a lot of potential. It is something that a lot of people are excited about and looking forward to. One of the major problems that most of the developers are concerned about is the backward compatibility. This is one of the main reasons that so many developers are raising concerns about making it the default WordPress editor. However, people are hopeful that a wrapper allowing the backward capability to TinyMCE is coming along before the integration of Gutenberg. There is no turning off of Gutenberg once it is integrated into the core as this will then be the official default editor for WordPress. If you are using handheld devices for website development, Gutenberg can be a great help. However, to make it a powerful tool for desktop users, the issues mentioned above should be solved by the developers before launching it.
