CheckIng our the latest build of WP 5 and Gutenberg 4.1 and I have to say with a minimal configuration of plugins it does show some promise.

As usual though there are some caveats.

The first thing I noticed is that the only way to disable Gutenberg is with the Classic Editor plugin. All other methods, simple one line filter in the functions.php file or a third party plugin will not work. For the filter we do know that it is the intention to provide a new version/name for this once Gutenberg is in core and perhaps the third party plugins depend on this filter somewhere in their code. It does beg the question though is the Classic/TinyMCE Editor still extant in core. It is a question that needs to be answered as we have been led to believe that this is what we have been told previously. Automatic core team has been a bit vague on this.

Of course the other caveats are my usual bug bears namely the lack of attention for the code view both in general and for each individual block. Code badly formatted, often minimised and could do with a bit of love by providing an IDE text editor like environment for it to be more useful.

While blocks are useful they don’t always work well for many use cases, namely straight forward text entry. On the layout side of things, Blocks need to do a lot more for structure, sections, rows, columns, flex etc. Some third party vendors have made some efforts but I have found these buggy and really it should be the purview of Gutenberg to provide a common foundation and API for theme, plugins and builders to sit upon.

The one immediate issue that needs to be tackled is the on page UX. targeting and manipulating blocks is rife with pitfalls which is a shame as it detracts from the usefullness of Gutenberg. From experience many of these hiccups lead to bad results.

Getting these criticism out of the way, i’ll move onto the the results which are not bad once you master Gutenbergs cryptic UI. The new button in the tool bar does help a little to locate blocks but you should be able to find these. Directly in the content.

The columns block is now improved with padding on the front and now responsive. A bit more work though still needs to be done on spacing and the mind boggles why blocks haven’t had padding and margin strings from the get go.

Using re-usable blocks as templates has some promise.

My test site used Divi and while, as has been highlighted, many elements from third party plugins/themes that previously appeared in Gutenberg are missing, I found with Classic Editor plugin activated, that everything behaved nicely ( I do have to pressure test it). I could opt to run with the Classic Editor for Divi pages and custom post types or just do a Gutenberg page. This separation of church and state works well which begs the question why Gutenberg is being implemented and introduced to WordPress users in such a crack handed manner.

The onbarding tactic has been all wrong and that falls under the remit of UX.

We would be better served if Gutenberg was only default on new installs, had a simple filter controlled by a switch in Writing settings to enable/disable Gutenberg/Classic Editor. There is no need for an extra plugin.