A Gutenberg WordPress 5.0 plugin review. Is it worth it?

Intro

With WordPress 5.0 release a controversial plugin, that replaces WordPress classic editor, the Gutenberg had arrived!

Despite its negative reviews of 2.5 stars over 5, compatibility concerns and lack of features of other similar page builders the new editor has been added to WordPress core – shocking everybody around. Advertised as the new editing experience the editor brings a lot of clunkiness, confusing solutions and poor editing experience packed in a good looking suit.

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Despite its elegant look, the inner editor screen is very clunky

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Insight

Our WordPress.org support forum review goes as is:

This plugin is a definitive visual improvement that works decently well…

Needless to say it’s quite counter-intuitive to use, ever occurring popups, hover effects and highlights are a huge distraction.

It’s simple when you use simple blocks, if you want to achieve something more robust, mix columns, shortcodes, multiple types of content the whole admin interface is unreadable and extremely counter-intuitive.

Finally the plugin puts a huge strain on user browser given the fact most of its job is done via JavaScript (not to mention the amount of JavaScript related bugs, that prevent some AJAX based plugins (like ACF PRO) from working correctly).

While I believe a lot of work has been put into the plugin itself, the whole project hasn’t been well thought and planned. I don’t think there’s anything that can be done with the project apart from putting it into the trash and starting over.

If the amount of negative response from the users is not enough then it means people responsible for the project are not the right ones.

Time and time again people and programmers who have been using WordPress have been showing that they don’t care about the artificial restrictions imposed by people behind WordPress.

The editor will create a new page- and post-building experience that makes writing rich posts effortless, and has “blocks” to make it easy what today might take shortcodes, custom HTML, or “mystery meat” embed discovery. — Matt Mullenweg

The main quote is a huge example of ignorance (or a lack of interest in third party plugins perhaps?), this plugin is nowhere near already existing page / block based builders.

[kkstarratings] We’ve left our 2 star review here.

Verdict 2/5

[icon icon=”thumbs-o-down”] Avoid: The Gutenberg is a horrible idea that doesn’t match client expectations.

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