Testing Gutenberg for the first time (ish)

I have tested Gutenberg in the past but, I hadn’t created a long article with different content with it until today.

For our empathy challenge, I decided to replicate the post “How Land Registry data reveals London’s secret tunnels” using the Photo Blog theme.

(1x speed version here)

To start with, it took me about 30 minutes to get a similar result. To be honest, it’s longer than I thought it would take me, especially when I was only copying and pasting the content. It was very frustrating to get the text cursor at the beginning of the pasted paragraph rather than at the end. I had to manually move it to the end to then press “enter” and add a new paragraph.

Initially, I got confused on how to add a new paragraph and ended up relying on the “enter” key. I was assuming that after my last paragraph I would have some sort of indicator to add a new paragraph (or block). I only realised halfway through that when you hover over the block a grey border appears, allowing you to add a new block. This feels very hidden!

I also noticed that the image blocks don’t have any `margin-bottom` in my theme. I had to write some custom CSS to make sure my images had the correct gap between them and the text. It’d be great if the plugin could add some margins by default.

I then found that the undo button failed to work efficiently. I had to click it many times even though it was only the last action I wanted to revert. I’m still unsure what happened there.

Whilst uploading new images, I was unsure as to where the previously uploaded images where. They were showing up in the library, but not directly in Gutenberg.

It was somewhat challenging to add a Google Map iframe. I ended up converting a block into code before realising I could just copy/paste the code for an iframe and it would automatically work. It would be cool to see the preview as soon as we paste the code.

Also, I was confused with why my featured image hadn’t shown up, it turned out that a theme option was turned off in the customiser.

Overall, it was a very pleasant experience. I like the simplicity/minimalism of the editor. I think it will take some time to get used to this new editor if you are a long-term WordPress user (old habits die hard) but I can definitely appreciate its potential.

---

Featured image courtesy of Claudia Soraya, via Unsplash.