🔥 Database Critical 🔥

This post is written with WordPress’ new fancy-pants editor, Gutenberg. WordPress version 5.0 is coming out very soon, likely in the next couple of weeks. Gutenberg has already been merged into core, so it will be interesting to see how things go post-5.0. I wanted to see how it ‘felt’ to write a post with Gutenberg, so here goes!

Weird stuff

The first thing I find weird about the writing experience with Gutenberg is that removing a block is counter-intuitive. Hitting backspace and having to delete reams of text is a bit funny. I would have thought that there would be a garbage can or something to remove a block.

(upon further investigation it appears there is a garbage can hidden under the more info dots ¯_(ツ)_/¯)

It’s also a bit weird personally _not_ writing in markdown mode, but that’s not really an issue with GB in particular.

I’m also not really sold on the concept of blocks, but I’m old and crusty at this point. I’m also a programmer, so I like text blobs!

I also think it’s weird that you can’t select text like you would in an editor. No way to select text from a bunch of blocks at once.

Good stuff

I think once people get used to the new editor it’ll be amazing for freelancers and agencies. It’s a tonne more feature-ful than the old editor. Especially for your average content editor. No need for crazy HTML in the post content to get a custom layout. No need for a bloated page builder either.

I think it’s also great the WP is pushing forward with a modern JS approach. That’s where things are going and having GB around in core will force WP devs to pick up things like ESNext and React. So I think that will drag us all forward. ?

P.S

I also wrote this post in dev and used WP Migrate DB Pro to deploy it live. Worked well!