

So Gutenberg introduces all sorts of interesting possibilities for content creation in WordPress.
#Wordpress gutenberg how to#
These are functionalities that previously required knowing how to code or using a separate plugin. Much of this has to do with presentation (changing the background color on a single paragraph of a blog post, for example), but it also opens the door to other options (such as reusing a block of text across multiple posts). Each one has settings with different options you can tweak. You can edit these blocks independently of each other. Anything can be a block: an entire post, a single paragraph, a quote, an image, a gallery of images, an embedded video, a button, a table, and so much more. Gutenberg uses blocks to handle each bit of content. OK, that all sounds great, but it’s also a little lofty and pie-in-the-sky. This is key to how you understand WordPress Gutenberg. It’s a dramatically different infrastructure to compete in a dramatically different time. More than simply competing with other layout solutions, this is taking WordPress into the next 10 years of publishing. It’s a wholesale change to how we think about content and presentation. Gutenberg isn’t necessarily ready to do all these things right now, but it’s laying the groundwork for these kinds of changes. You could reuse a piece of content across your site.You could share a piece of content outside of the traditional content architecture.You could introduce conditional formatting and only show content if specific conditions are met.Having that information means you can do more with it: This is an ad or a testimonial or something else. It restores intention to the markup language, so rather than just noting that you want something to be bold or italics, you’re noting what it is and what your intention is. Gutenberg does that, but it also does a lot more. You move stuff around and make it look pretty. Wix and SquareSpace and all the others offer layout solutions. It narrows how many ways there are to do something, giving us more control and thus more power. What if we narrowed how many ways there are to get things done so we could enable getting more things done? WordPress gave us a lot of ways to break things. Each of those solutions isn’t always the best way to do something, and often they can be misused or even abused. We’ve got shortcodes, HTML, TinyMCE buttons, embedded URLs, plugins, themes, etc. Right now there are multiple ways of doing things with WordPress. It’s streamlining how things work in order to do more. Gutenberg is a refactoring of the entire WordPress platform. To understand WordPress Gutenberg, you need to get the seismic nature of this shift.


This is a big and potentially powerful change. WordPress Gutenberg is more than a cool new drag-and-drop editor. That means there’s a lot more going on under the hood. Gutenberg is a block-based layout engine. Most people say that Gutenberg is a new editor for WordPress. Check out the webinar for all of Chris’ wisdom, but we’re going to summarize what he shared. Gutenberg is an answer to those drag-and-drop approaches-but it also does a lot more.Ĭhris Lema, our vice president of products and innovation here at Nexcess, shares his insights on Gutenberg in his one-hour webinar, Preparing for Gutenberg. Wix and SquareSpace and other website builders have challenged the claim WordPress has on easy website building. But more than making things look pretty, Gutenberg really opens the door for new possibilities in WordPress. WordPress Gutenberg is a block-based layout engine. But to truly understand WordPress Gutenberg, you need to know it’s also a lot more than that. Gutenberg is a new visual editor rolling out to WordPress.
