As we continue to eagerly await the release of the WordPress’ visual editor, Gutenberg, we have received another glimpse into what it may look like. A few weeks back, a lead editor on the project wrote a piece detailing some facets of Gutenberg. Matias Ventura wrote of some of the influences in place for Gutenberg, something we have written about on our own blog. You can read the whole article on his site but here are some takeaways from Ventura’s work.
A founding ideal for the creation of WordPress’ visual editing tool was to improve on how users engage with WordPress. Ventura somewhat doubled down on user experience in his post. In addition to the inclusion of rich content blocks in WordPress’ backend, he claimed users will be treated to routine updates that will only have a positive impact on how they use Gutenberg. Users can also happily note that their content won’t be lost in this transition, as Ventura notes in his blog that the transition for other editors to Gutenberg won’t result in a loss of content or a discontent in document rendering.
This new style of content entry found as part of Gutenberg was also created as an improvement to the way pages are designed. Traditionally, a common knock against WordPress was an inflexibility when it came to design and development and how design intersected with content. Gutenberg was noted as a “powerful design tool,” one that engages smartly with both users and designers. Designers can protect structural markup (foundational facets of a website that allow it to run properly) while users are still able to make drastic changes to content. In Ventura’s words, the WordPress’ visual editor “puts more tools in the hands of developers and designers without alienating users.”
Working in tandem with the benefits designers and users see, developers will also be happy to see the features coming to WordPress’ visual editor. As stated above, Gutenberg’s content entry is executed through content blocks. Though Gutenberg has many blocks ready to go, the code that creates them will also be available for developers to take and run with. This creates a level of limitlessness for developers. In addition, these newly developed content blocks can be posted to online as plugins to be used by other developers.
We’ve been excitedly following any news surrounding this revolutionary, WordPress-developed visual editor. Stay tuned for any more updates.