After Aretha Franklin’s passing, one has to wonder…Does a thing exist in this world that isn’t completely divisive? It seems we could all agree the Queen of Soul was a gem, but we’re diametrically opposed on everything else. Look at reviews on Amazon and Yelp and find that disproportionately fewer people are just “meh” about anything anymore. We’re either stoked or devastated. And the WordPress Gutenberg editor is no different.

gutenberg-plugin

You probably know the backstory. Gutenberg has resided as a plugin the repository. In version 5, WordPress promotes the Gutenberg editor to core. The upgrade or downgrade, depending on your highly-opinionated point of view, has led to some rather funny reviews by those who regard this change as a complete and utter catastrophe.

The “What Even Is WordPress?”

WordPress is God, this is the devil. It’s utterly hideous and is only of value to people that are too stupid to work out how to use a basic editing interface – in which case they should stick to Wix not WordPress!

Please don’t make this compulsory. I’d rather convert all my 200 WordPress client websites to Joomla or HTML.

I can understand this sentiment here. WordPress.org users are in my experience considerably different than users of Wix, Foursquare, [insert your pagebuilder], or even WordPress.com. If WordPress wants some of that pie, they risk diluting their niche and leaving developers no choice but to explore alternative CMSs like Joomla or Drupal or even deciding not to deploy a CMS in the first place.

The Random Capitalization

…I’m really FRUSTRATED AND ANGRY right now that you are threatening all our sites with this piece of junk.
It is NOT A GOOD EDITOR
It is NOT A GOOD PAGE BUILDER
It is coder self-congratulating themselves without realizing they are screwing up OUR experience as CONTENT CREATORS and users.
Sorry.
IMHO this needs another 2 years in development before it is shoved down our throat without killing us – aka without killing the WordPress platform altogether.

I can’t say I love the writing style. But behind the line breaks and all caps, there’s a valid point here. It sure seems like the already postponed Gutenberg to core initiative still has some kinks to be massaged out before it is ready for prime time. That said, user adoption is a big driver in bug fixing. WordPress may be keen on accelerating the painful part of this change akin to ripping off the band-aid.

The “You Made Me Work”

I had such a bad experience using Gutenberg that I literally signed up for an account just to beg you not to switch to it. It’s a terrible interface that makes it very difficult to build clean pages. Please don’t do it.

Other users have indicated in their reviews that they created a WordPress account for the sole purpose of complaining on the internet. When has that ever been successful?

The “You’re Putting Me Out of Work”

I manage the websites for a group of regional newspapers. If I allow the Gutenberg editor to be active on our sites, I will lose my job. If I’m not lynched first!

Our journalists who enter the stories on the website will be aghast to find each paragraph in its own block. Who writes like that? Where did you guys get that metaphor from?…Gutenberg is to online writing, what InDesign is to word processing. The hard way.

I couldn’t agree more. I certainly don’t blog in blocks. Com’on, WordPress: Blogging is your raison d’etre.

The Poet

Not only does the Gutenberg plugin scatter cruft across your screen with such volume that you can barely determine where you are supposed to work, but they have mangled the date selector to match the horrid one on WordPress.com. I often find myself creating sites with posts from the distant past. With the classic GUI, you simply tab and type your date. With Gutenberg, you have to click until your finger falls off and then switch fingers to get to the date you need. Gutenberg also impregnates your posts with a bunch of comments for its own purposes.

I saw quite a few comments about the extra number of clicks involved to do anything. That experience jives with my own. It’s not ideal, though something that is easier to fix upon the deluge of user feedback.

The “Wake Up, Sheeple”

@all WP-Users: Wake up! The Gutenberg-Editor is only the top of the iceberg!

The Gutenberg-Editor is not the end of a wrong path – it’s the beginning. Read carefully was has been said in the announcements: Everything is going to be changed. The way shortcuts, menus, headers, footers and widgets will be handled. Everything will turn into ‘blocks’.

What does that mean? Everything you are using today like plugins, themes or self created little helpers are designed for the ‘old’ WordPress. In the new word of blocks they will either not work any more, they will have to be modified completely or they will simply be unnecessary. What do you think? Does it sound like lots of fun? Or more like a disaster?

A good example is that WordPress has acknowledged that the classic editor override plugin is a stopgap measure. But how much time will they give us before we have to adapt or move on from WordPress?

The Snark

Congratulations — you have managed to take what used to be Simple and made it Complex. In fact, you’ve moved beyond Complex to Dysfunctional. The ability to ‘Open Link in New Window’ feature ‘Box’ is still there — it just doesn’t work, anymore. What a waste of Time and Resources. Either, pull this Grand Idea off the WordPress Platform until you can get it Right, or simply put this whole Idea out of our Misery.

This reviewer dubbed the phenomenon ‘reverse genius’. And he has a point. The move to Gutenberg will undoubtedly make things harder for everyone, at least in the initial launch.

The “Squirrel!”

On top of that, he is not interrested in a little a bit of privacy.

I’m going to leave it here. Sometimes, greatness is a sentence so cryptic that your imagination runs wild. I don’t know what privacy has to do with anything, or who “he” is, and I’m not even going to try interpreting this.