Hi everyone!
I’m back to my blog with a bit more technical post about my website’s setup, that will probably interest those of you who have designed and run your personal portfolio websites on Wordpress and you are already fed up with the dysfunctional new default editor.
If you belong to this category of people then ….
Those who use Wordpress on their websites, will definitely are aware by now about the changes that Wordpress did in the platform’s user interface, by changing the the TinyMCE text editor that was the default wordpress editor up until some months ago, to the supposedly more advanced Gutenberg editor.
The problem with Gutenberg editor though is that it is not what someone could call a classic text editor. It has neither the looks nor the functions of a normal editor. In other words it doesn’t offer an area where you can write some text, add some images, use the buttons to edit the text and the images, click on publish and post your new article or blog post.
Gutenberg is all about virtual blocks. Blocks for everything! Blocks for each and every paragraph of the text you intent to publish, blocks for each and every image, each and every link, sentence etc. etc. etc. which the user have to edit individually from countless menus and submenus available for each and every block and each and every possible function, some of them hidden at the most unpredictable places.
Gutenberg works with the logic of Lego toys, ( or should I say Tetris game perhaps?! ) and is designed to be used more from those who make websites from scratch and want to move parts of the websites layout up and down, in order to find where to place everything. It is more about page building and less about text editing and publishing.
That makes any attempt to write and publish a post with Gutenberg the equivalent of trying to edit the text of an email of yours with a Desktop Publishing application! Or writing and essay on Photoshop! That much complicated and unneeded.
It seems that the Wordpress people, those at least who take the decisions on Wordpress Foundation, don’t really understand that the majority of those who use WP don’t use it in order to build a new web page on each and every single post they publish.
The average bloggers or website owners, just want to add new posts on an already existing website, with an already existing design and layout. They simply want to update their websites and not build them from scratch. So they don’t need something so complicated as a page builder for writing and publishing their posts.
Personally now, after trying for a while to get used to this and spending effort and time in order to publish the simplest of posts, I found my self completely fed up with the whole thing. So instead of turning to half solutions like the plugin that brings back the old editor, I did something more radical and permanent.
I switched my website on Classic Press that is free to use fork of wordpress without the new Gutenberg editor.
That was really easy to do as there is available a plugin here that when you use it in your installation migrates your website’s cms from Wordpress to Classic Press in a matter of minutes without changing anything of what already exists there.
All and everything stay where you initially have them but the new editor goes away…. where it came from! It is that simple and effective.
In case now that you still worry about your skills on doing the migration… don’t worry that much. There is a whole community of people here made of people that were also fed up with the new editor, that will gladly assist you and help you resolve the/any issues that you might have, ( if you encounter any).
So … to conclude. If you are fed up, sick and tired and your nerves are already broken with the new wordpress editor, do yourself a favour to switch back to what you knew how to use and trusted.
There is an alternative that if anything else it will spare you the money that you would otherwise spent for psychological support! lol
P.S I’m not affiliated with Classic Press. Classic Press is after all a free to use, open source CMS that doesn’t sponsor anyone, neither is for sale. This post is here in order to inform you about the existence of an alternative and save you from the hassle of dealing with Gutenberg editor.
You can comment, ask questions or tell me your own experiences in the comments section below.The comments are moderated in order to avoid spam, but never censored so feel free to express yourself.
Thank you for visiting my website and reading my blog.
All my sites that were using WordPress have now been migrated to ClassicPress. It is reassuring to know I’m safe from any Gutenberg code and I’m not going to wake up one day to find my sites are broken through an automatic update.
Of course, you are still free to use a page builder such as Elementor if you want. You get back the freedom to run your site the way you choose.
Page builders are suitable for those who design websites and they want unique designs for their customers. The ordinary users retain a layout on their websites and just update them. They don’t need to rearrange their posts’ layout every time they publish something new. They just don’t need a page builder let alone a complicated and full of bugs and malfunctions one.
There’s NO QUESTION about it! ClassicPress IS the FUTURE… I abandoned ALL Wordpress on my 10 websites as soon as it was evident that the WP folks did not care what our opinions of Gutenberg were, and forced it into core!
That was another of the reasons why I migrated my website too. The fact that the WP folks ignored the countless negative reviews that they got from people that use WP on their websites and included the new editor into the WP core no matter if that editor was functional or compatible with the various different plugins.
For me ignoring user’s opinion this way, means that in time they will apply with the exact same attitude, similar dysfunctional features and they will force the WP users to use them either they like them or not.
This is not though how a community oriented platform should work.
When the user base says “NO” it is certain that it means it!
I know this if off topic but I’m looking into starting my
own blog and was wondering what all is required to get set up?
I’m assuming having a blog like yours would cost a pretty penny?
I’m not very web smart so I’m not 100% sure.
Any suggestions or advice would be greatly appreciated. Thanks
If you intent to set your website up all by yourself, ( as I did) it is required to buy a domain name and a hosting subscription. Those, depending always on the available offers, will cost you about 50 euros/dollars/pounds annually.
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Try Yoast SEO plugin.
Hello @Marialena
I posted this over on ClassicPress as well. Your article clearly outlines the frustration people feel with the new Gutenberg editor in WordPress – myself included, and I build a lot sites!
We are not far behind you! As an agency, I have decided WP 5.5 is enough. I have schedule in the complete rebuild for our agency website in CP. Movign forward, we may decide to abandon WP, unless clients specifically ask for it.
I have been watching Gutenberg from Day-One, when it was first introduced back in the summer of 2017 (lots of articles on my blog about that one).
https://web242.com/tag/wordpress-5/
I haven’t liked it from day-one, and still don’t. I see no value in it for our clients, or anything that helps them – other than to make life more difficult. I will never adopt the Gutenberg editor, nor force my clients to use it. While we do indeed use page-builders, we leave blog posts with the TinyMCE editor, and use simple text fields or TinyMCE fields for anything custom.
All the best, and see you around the CP forums!
Cheers
Avrom
Hi Avrom and thank you for your comment.
I’m very glad to see that more people and companies realize that there is an alternative that at the end of the day is not that much different than how WP used to be before the introduction of that Gutenberg editor.
That Gutenberg editor is a failure because it is neither a well designed page builder, ( there are way better page builders out there), and nor a text editor.
If that was a food it wouldn’t be neither meat nor fish! It would be the best excuse to become vegan… lol
Anyway I’m very glad that you found Classic Press and that you as a company you’ll be able to promote Classic Press to your clients, because there is a lot of censorship and hostility towards CP and I suspect that this comes from WP people.
I realised that recently when I tried to inform other frustrated WP users about the existence of CP and my comments or messages were not approved or were deleted.
That looks to me as a quite petty behaviour by the time that it is supposed that WP is a free and open source cms and it is allowed to modify it and offer forks.
Hi Marialena,
Thank you so much! You are correct, it’s best not leave any mention of ClassicPress on WordPress. They scrub those out, and do ban accounts – mine was frozen after leaving my views.
You are correct, it is neither a page-builder nor a text-editor, and makes utterly no sense at all. It was rolled out from day-one poorly and without any consideration to millions of users. All they had to do was look at MailChimp, which actually does have a good block editor.
PS
I’ll email you a screenshot of what I see on my Chrome and FireFox (Windows 10). Android phone is fine. 😉
Cheers
Avrom
They do so on other blogs and web design companies websites. Not only on WP website. Perhaps the owners of the web design companies like to torture their customers… lol
I foresee that in the immediate future a huge number of WP users will abandon it.
That was after all my first thought when my website got the Gutenberg “upgrade” on v. 5.0 ( in quotes because that wasn’t an upgrade at all). That was on January 2019 if I remember well.
If I hadn’t find a comment on a blog that mentioned Classic Press I should had to switch to another cms . But I found Classic Press and I migrated my website without second thoughts as I knew that the plugin is a temporary solution and this mutation of a text editor would have had compatibility issues to the end of time… ha ha ha
That is how bad it was and as it became obvious…. still is.
Just wondering how you’re getting on with ClassicPress. It’s been over a year since you migrated. Would you go back to WP?
Bah…. 😀