So today WordPress decided to roll out Gutenberg in a sub-version update. I was generally looking forward to working with the new editor blocks, however now I spent hours just to get one page displaying correctly, where I just wanted to achieve a simple thing: columns.
Rolling out Gutenberg with "Columns" still in beta and absolutely not working, I really have to rant about it. My new favourite CSS display option is the grid, which is easily implemented. Even Shortcodes Ultimate can do columns with a few floats and clearing them on mobile. Gutenberg however makes a complete mess, when you try to have a few multi-column layouts. And on top of that, the columns aren't mobile ready. So keep on working on that, Gutenberg team!
I ended up inserting html blocks between the elements with shortcodes for rows and columns from Shortcodes Ultimate plugin, which at least makes the site look nice and also being able to have correct mobile layout.
One option I quite like is to add a "title image" block, which is a dimmed background image with text on top. It works quite well... unless you decide it would be nice to have the title image floating, then the whole thing distorts the layout. And once again, mobile styles don't seem to be ready.
Another thing I have to rant about is the way you edit blocks. I understand that the editor view is not the way it will look like on the front-end, however giving blocks at least a bit of coloring to see in one go for example where you put a spacer block might be nice.
What is missing completely is the toolbox of the TinyMCE Editor, where you can clear formatting (really neccessary for all of my clients, who copy&paste from Word etc.). Also overlapping block options make it hard to choose the correct block item for editing. The whole experience is not quite so intuitive like you would expect from a WordPress editor. It reminds me more of a really crappy version of Visual Composer or similar page builders.
What I definitely noticed was a few hiccoughs when loading either frontend or backend. Some of my clients have the cheaper hosting packages (like 1&1) and will definitely notice loading issues.
Another things that was bothering me a lot is while working with the Gutenberg Editor and you have the media library open in another tab, load something in there and then try to access it through the Gutenberg Editor, it simply doesn't show up in the media library. Even when you click the saving button it doesn't change, only when you refresh the browser tab, everything is where it should be. There were also some issues when uploading an image inside the Gutenberg Editor. Sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn't. Once again: still buggy and not ready to be rolled out, people!
I am happy to test anything that WordPress throws at me, but if it doesn't fit my needs, I will much rather keep building layouts with shortcodes and custom fields.
