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Jeff Chandler

Gutenberg 2.6 Introduces Drag and Drop Block Sorting

Gutenberg 2.6 is available for download and with it, comes a new way of sorting blocks. In addition to using up and down arrows, this version introduces the ability to sort blocks by dragging and dropping.

If you hover the cursor over the up and down arrows on the left side of a block, you’ll see a hand icon. Simply click, hold, and drag the block up or down below or above the blue indicator.

In my limited testing, I found drag and drop to be hit or miss. Sometimes, when I try to drag and drop a block, the blue line doesn’t show up.

The hand icon for the cursor is different for the top and bottom of the block. You can drag a block by hovering over the bottom of it but you can’t do it from the top.

Hovering the cursor at the top of the block
Hovering the cursor at the bottom of the block

I also found it difficult to add a new block manually. For example, when I add a paragraph block, I don’t see the Plus icon to create a new block underneath it anymore.

Pressing enter at the end of a paragraph creates a new Paragraph block automatically. But I don’t know how to transform it into an image block. I’ll need to do more testing to figure out what’s going on.

There’s a host of other improvements and bug fixes in this release, some of which I covered in this post. 

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22 responses to “Gutenberg 2.6 Introduces Drag and Drop Block Sorting”

    • Negative voices tend to be more negative than positive, especially in a process like Gutenberg.

      There are still a lot of fairly vocal members of the WordPress community who thinks Gutenberg and its inclusion in core is still up for debate and as such try their hardest to argue against it, which also leads to negative reviews. Others install Gutenberg not realizing it is still very much beta where things can and do break, at least it has been for a while, and then give a bad review.

      My point is, you shouldn’t pay too much attention to the one-star reviews currently.

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      • “Others install Gutenberg not realizing it is still very much beta where things can and do break”
        Maybe it’s because 1) There’s a push to have a “Try it” link on the Dashboard, and 2) it’s version 2.6, and not, say, something like 0.2.6, that would tell people it’s beta…

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        • Many of the negative reviews are tied to earlier versions of Gutenberg. Because of the speed at which the plugin has been iterated, I’d look at those numbers and reviews and take them with a grain of salt. They’re not indicative of the latest release.

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      • LOL @Jeff, with all due respect have you even looked at the dates of the reviews?

        How come only “bad” reviews are out dated, but “good” reviews are not? (which is a general problem with the review system, you should be able to limit the time range of the reviews for all plugins).

        To get to a 4 star review you need about 4 five star reviews against each one star (my math probably a little off) do you think there was even one time range during the life of gutenberg in which that was the case?

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    • Well it should be at 0.2.6 at this point of time and not 2,6….

      Yes this is still in beta due to how messed up Gutenberg is.

      Gutenberg could be game changing, BUTTT we have so many page builder plugins that exist for WordPress that are wayyy more powerful than Gutenberg though.

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  4. Huge fan of Gutenberg. The drag and drop works okay. I don’t have much use for it tbh. I’m not a fan of them removing the explicit plus sign for adding images etc. It’s a little janky there to me. But yeah, not really a huge issue right now. Way better than the default editor already.

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  5. In the past few years, for various reasons, I have used Elementor, Beaver Builder Pro, Divi Builder plugin (and the theme version), WPBakery Page Builder (formerly known as Visual Composer), SiteOrigin Page Builder, plus one or two others, to develop sites both for myself and for clients.

    Although most of these page editors have some good points, very few of them are notably good overall, and don’t produce the clean code that makes for a fast website, so they are not the tools I choose to have in my toolbox, and rely on.

    All, bar a couple, are worse than Gutenberg in many respects. But those two are so far ahead ~ and will probably stay ahead ~ that it makes Gutenberg an interesting distraction, but pointless.

    As JJJ said in the podcast. Its just an editor and doesn’t address the underlying end-user dissatisfaction with WordPress’s content creation and editing experience.

    If anything, it flys in the face of it.

    What’s needed is an elegant, front-end, WYSIWYG page editor. And this Gutenberg is not.

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  6. While it is fair to say early reviews are responding to a very different experience, the number of negative reviews appears to have slightly increased over the past month. Negative reviews continuously hovered around 40-50 more than positive ones for many months, but for the past month they’ve slowly crept up to 60+.

    It will be very interesting to see where this goes once the call-out to try Gutenberg appears in the WP admin.

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  7. To be honest, I’m excited about the new update. Unfortunately, this may make some creators have to start from scratch, but we know it won’t be long before someone rises from the ashes with a brand new way of utilizing Gutenberg.

    Now that we’re discussing updates, I believe there should be a “view counter” fresh out of the box with an option to turn it off. There are plenty of WordPress websites running videos at the moment. As an outsider looking in, I’m not sure why this wouldn’t be a priority or at least an option.

    Just my thoughts, go Gutenberg!

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  8. Just as an aside…

    With the latest release of Elementor Pro (version 2.0), you can now visually customize your headers, footers, archive pages, single post pages and other areas of your site.

    This not only saves you time, but introduces a whole new drag and drop experience to building WordPress website, and is light years ahead of Gutenberg.

    With Elementor Pro 2.0, you can start thinking of templates (not blocks) as design units, capable of customizing each and every area of your site (including your blog, footer and so on).

    Until now this was a restriction of all page builders, not just Gutenberg, where they all leave parts of the website to be coded at the theme level.

    Gutenberg still has a long way to go.

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  9. I also see that Elementor has just published a child theme — but the interesting thing is its a child of their page-builder, not of a theme.

    https://github.com/pojome/elementor-hello-theme

    The reason this is so interesting, is because (apart from the awesome control it gives us mere mortals), it means that with Elementor 2.0 you now don’t need a theme, premium or otherwise. In fact, adding virtually any theme at all is just adding bloat!

    I am using it for a new site now, and loving it!

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  10. Rock On Terence! Elementor is truly changing the landscape for us small business owners who simply want a working, feature-rich site that we can EASILY design and control. They are the true disruptors in this field … and they’re doing it without the threat of breaking my site. (I only hope they can survive the upcoming storm).

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  11. I’d like to see a handle or something added to the blocks on hover that you can click to drag rather than how it is currently. It felts a little clunky when I was using it, I’ll leave this as feedback too of course for the people working on it.

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