I wrote this poem, entitled “My Favourite Block”, for a lightning talk that I prepared for the February 2019 WordPress Portsmouth Meetup.
WordPress 5.0, Gutenberg and the Classic Editor – what did you expect?
Well that was a fuck up!
I’ve heard reports that the Classic Editor plugin was updated just a few hours before WordPress 5.0 was released and now there’s a completely different user experience.
The ability to easily choose the editor to create your content has disappeared. For me, that was the whole reason for having the plugin. Some things don’t work in Gutenberg / 5.0 so I need the ability to use both.
I don’t think the use cases for the Classic Editor and Gutenberg and WordPress version combinations have been thought through. I know that I am going to continue to want to use both Gutenberg and the Classic editor under WordPress 5.0. And I need the ability to easily select my preferred editor. That’s how it was with 0.5. It’s how I tested my sites’ compatibility.
You don’t bugger about with something hours before a release. You give people a chance to test it.
Lessons need to be learned. WordPress 5.0 release should have been delayed until:
- v1.0 of the Classic Editor had been tested with Gutenberg 4.6.1 and WordPress 4.9.8 & 5.0-RC3.
- User documentation was ready.
- The host of issues starting with #4855 had been addressed.
Fortunately, I haven’t yet upgraded anything yet. I will be testing Classic Editor v1.1 very carefully.
oik-block – Gut feel revisited
Back in April I was developing a prototype plugin called oik-block that contained a number of prototype Gutenberg blocks plus a whole load of code that helped me to form opinions regarding Gutenberg’s compatibility with my sites and to estimate the code of migrating to Gutenberg and/or WordPress 5.0. I’ve recently forked oik-block to create a new plugin called oik-blocks. Here’s an update.