WordPress Gutenberg upsets writer’s flow

…he might also figure out how to dovetail them all together to make something more interesting and useful than Gutenberg, which has taken hundreds of developers and a magnitude larger amount of time to create.Perhaps some additional competition against Gutenberg would help speed WordPress (and everyone else for that matter) toward making a simpler and more direct publishing interface?

Source: Chris Aldrich

“…he might also figure out how to dovetail them all together to make something more interesting and useful than Gutenberg, which has taken hundreds of developers and a magnitude larger amount of time to create.”

WordPress's Gutenberg editor serves some users well. For many it is an unnecessary complication. It disrupts workflows and makes life harder. In some cases a lot harder.

It was optional at first. Now it is built into both WordPress.com and WordPress.org.

Ironically Gutenberg is all about blocks. Ironic because when I teach people how to write, one of things I tell them is to remove all the blocks in front of readers.

Roadblocks

Gutenberg puts roadblocks in front of writers.

One roadblock is that it is now harder to export a post from a Markdown editor like iA Writer to WordPress. It works, but it’s not as smooth and seamless. The barrier may be small, but tiny barriers can disrupt flow.

It is even harder to export HTML from a Gutenberg page.

Gutenberg makes it hard for users to syndicate material to publisher sites with their own CMSs. In the past you could write a post in WordPress, then pick it up as simple HTML and post that into the other CMS.

While Gutenberg allows you to copy HTML, the mechanism is badly broken and needs extensive editing. It means much more work.

Perhaps the most telling feature of Gutenberg is that more than 5 million WordPress users have download and use a plug-in that makes their site work in a pre-Gutenberg way. WordPress says it will soon stop supporting that plug-in. If that happens, you can expect a rush of people moving to other blog or website building alternatives.