Far from intuitive design. No wonder why 5 million people installed the "Classic editor" Plugin. Also Popular themes turn Gutenberg plugin off. I really wonder who the test panel was.

So many of the reviews of Gutenberg are binary—black or white. They claim Gutenberg is either total garbage not even worthy of existing (the vast majority), or the best editor that has ever been built (far fewer, but still there). The reality is far more nuanced. The editor doesn't completely suck. But it also isn't perfect. Are their problems and rough edges with Gutenberg? Yes. Is the editor a move in a positive direction for WordPress? Absolutely. Like many reviewers, at first I hated Gutenberg. Looking back, I think a lot of that hate came from a gut reaction and aversion to change. Some was definitely attributed to the early days of Gutenberg indeed being a hot mess. The editor has come a long, long way since the initial release and is now far more functional and useful. I now exclusively use it for new sites and am working on transitioning a number of existing sites over (more on this later). In total I am using Gutenberg on 12 different sites. The good: My clients who are trained on Gutenberg love it! It is far closer to WYSIWYG than the old editor. Now that they are used to the difference in how the editor works, I often get comments about how simple things are. Gutenberg makes it is easier to do advanced things such as column layout. Many reviewers claim that even simple tasks require several more clicks. That simply isn't true. And now all tasks are essentially treated the exact same. Everything is a block. Once you understand blocks and that they can have individual settings, the rest falls into place. My clients also make far less mistakes, especially since they used to rely on error prone shortcodes for so much of the advanced functionality. It was inevitable that a client would inadvertently delete a ] for a shortcade and email me asking why their site was broken. When you embrace it fully, Gutenberg can be incredibly powerful. As a developer, the editor being completely written in JS, and having complete access to core data stores means I can create plugins and tools for users I could have only dreamed of before. For example, I recently built a live accessibility checker. It checks the content and metadata (as the user types!) for common accessibility issues, like missing alt attributes on images or incorrect heading hierarchy. My users now make far less accessibility mistakes when publishing content! This makes for a better web for all. There are more keyboard shortcuts. Saving a post, true undo and redo, block insertion with / etc. All great additions. That said, I do miss the heading shortcuts of the old editor. Of course, Gutenberg still has some rough edges: The number one is speed. It is still fairly slow to load the initial edit page (6 or 7 seconds, even in a local dev environment) and pages with a large number of blocks (i.e. a few hundred) can make the interface less responsive. I would love to see a release dedicated to performance and bug fixes. I know development is charging ahead on things like widgets, content areas, and editing site wide content, but I would strongly recommend shoring up what is already in place a little more first. The second biggest issue (at least from the perspective of a plugin/theme developer) is documentation. It sucks. As a developer working with WordPress for a dozen years, I'm used to very detailed and descriptive documentation, with lots of examples. The documentation for Gutenberg is largely missing or cryptically worded. Only the very basics (like registering a simple block) are decently documented. As soon as I start branching out beyond the basics (like working with data stores or APIs) I spend a large amount of time digging through Gutenberg's JS files looking to see how the developers of Gutenberg did something. I'm a less productive developer because of it. Some interactions can be cumbersome and clumsy. For example, if you have a number of blocks nested within each other, it can be very difficult to select the exact block you want. I end up needing to use my up and down arrow keys, or the block navigation far too often. Another example is around finding the exact right place to click to insert a new nested block when using InnerBlocks. If your block has any padding, this can be maddening. Migrating existing sites is very difficult and time consuming. I have only moved a couple sites to Gutenberg, but it has often involved completely reworking the content of every page/post. This especially applies to more complex sites with numerous shortcodes and layout builders. I'm honestly not sure what can be done to address this, but it is a big burden. Finally, a minor gripe, the HTML and CSS of the editor makes styling blocks in the editor challenging. All the negative margins, absolutely positioned elements, and dozens of nested HTML elements mean I spend a lot of time digging through the web inspector. Conclusion: For all those asking to abolish Gutenberg entirely, I feel that is a rash judgement. Gutenberg offers a lot of benefits, if you're willing to embrace it fully. In hindsight, I would have suggested only enabling Gutenberg by default on new installs of WordPress, and perhaps waiting a little longer for some of the major shortcomings to be worked out. That said, today Gutenberg is quite powerful and heading in the right direction.

Very fast, smooth and user friendly. Thanks

We ❤️ Classic Editor!

I hoped that the kinks would be worked out by now, but there are still tons of normal things that you can't do in Gutenberg because of how blocks work. I try to minimize plugins for performance and security, but I have had to install way more than usual just to do things that were simple in the old editor but impossible in Gutenberg. And it's cumbersome as well. I haven't yet bailed out and installed the Classic Editor plugin, because I thought I should give Gutenberg a fair chance, but I might have to. For the minority who like Gutenberg, it would be fine as a plugin, but why can't the default editor simply be an editor?

How did this abomination ever graduate from beta to prime time??? Simply put... it sucks BDD! No one likes it... everyone is screaming about it... so, move on!!! The only proof you need is that the #1 trending plugin simply reverts Gooberberg to the previous editor! Wanna make a REAL GUI block editor? Shoulda checked out the successful ones first... Elementor comes to mind first. #ShamefulWP #PhotoMatt