Project Gutenberg

Project Gutenberg is the vision for the new editor experience in WordPress. It offers a content block type solution to adding different elements within your posts or pages in a simple and convenient way.

The editor will endeavour to 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.

The existing solution in WordPress uses Tinymce. For most people it’s a perfectly fine way to write blog posts and create pages for their site. Using a combination of adding text, the formatting options in the Tinymce, shortcodes, HTML and CSS most people are able to add the content they want and format it to look how they desire. Essentially the new editor flow would enable you to separate each of those elements out into individual blocks, each with their own settings and content.

Trying Project #Gutentberg

As a WordPress user I’m interested in the future of the editor experience. What am I going to be writing posts in? What will I be working with? I wanted to try early and make sure the vision for the future meets my needs. If it doesn’t then there’s still time for me to give feedback and make sure that it does 🙂 Currently Gutenberg is available to download from the WP repo as a plugin. Install, activate and give it a test run.

https://twitter.com/Will_Patton_88/status/881065615158644736

And so there are some bugs to work out, some issues with theme styling compatibility etc. What I’ve found in my limited use so far is that it’s not quite polished enough to use everywhere. It’s more than sufficient for writing blogs posts like this one though. It’s possible to save posts and swap between editors if you choose. If you need to fill in any meta boxes for a post, such as any SEO or post type specific meta boxes, you’ll still need to use the existing WP editor to fill those.

Providing Feedback – Reporting Bugs/Issues and making Feature Requests.

Development is very active with a plan to issue 1 release a week with fixes, improvements and changes. Discussion happens on the make.wordpress.org blog and in the slack #core-editor channel.

You can report bugs in the plugin’s support forum but a better place is to create issues for them in the Project Gutenberg repo at GitHub. Just so I can test the button content block there’s one below directly to the GitHub issues page for the project.