I went to a WordPress Meetup tonight to try and catch up with Gutenberg, which is supposedly launching in April. Shannon Smith from the WordPress.com VIP team did a very nice job with the presentation, and kind of set aside some of my concerns. But not entirely.
What is Gutenberg, you ask?
Gutenberg is the next-gen editor code and (seemingly) baseline technology being baked into WordPress for V5, which is supposed to drop on April 18th. It changes – utterly and entirely – the editing interfaces in WordPress – but also there are plans for this technology to permeate all of WordPress, and be the default editor but also the default interface for plugins and all sorts of other things.
The problem is that there are so many unknowns that it's really hard to get a handle on what this really means. For instance, I make extensive use of tables, and have a plugin (not on this site, on my "production" sites – all 25 of them) to handle this. How will this interact with Gutenberg? Not sure. In theory, I'd create a shortcode block, paste the table's shortcode there and it will just work.
But expecting things to just work is difficult when just two paragraphs up, I found no way, using Gutenberg, to do something basic like formatting the "th" as a superscript! And below this 'graf is an image I would want to align right and wrap around – but there doesn't seem to be a way to do that.
Oh Hai this is OK.
This text is wrapping around the image. I kind of wish it could flow itself around, but who knows maybe this will be OK.
Found a way to do the superscript as well, though it's a slow solution.
One thing I still can't do is check the contents of the text box in Antidote, which is a must-do for every post published. I suppose I could write, switch to text mode and then do it. But I currently write only in plain text, so why would I want to do that?
OK so that worked – to some extent. There was some automatic formatting (curly quotes and the like) that made Antidote puke, so I'd want to (have to) override that.
Columnizing text is kind of interesting, but I'm not sure I could paste it into columns… which sort of defeats the purpose.
Overall, although I'm pretty positive about the potential for this, to be responsible my only approach can be to find ways to protect myself from this. And I have to say, I kind of resent WordPress for basically inventing a whole boatload of work I'm going to have to do just to not break anything…
