WordPress (both the .org and .com versions) is rolling out a new native editor. It is a “block” system, and I am entirely unsure how I feel about it. I figured I would give them the benefit of the doubt and try to write a somewhat complete post using the WordPress.org back-end, with this new block system, and see how it goes.
This block system is meant to be some intuitive organizational effort for people writing blog posts. Anytime I start a new paragraph, it also creates a new logical block in the post. So, to change the font I can go to the settings for the block and click what I want. Other block options I see are photos, files, charts, lists, and quotes. Any “object” that you would wish to get thrown on a separate line becomes a “block” in this editing document.
Now, there are benefits to this. For one, it makes the editor slightly more minimalist than it was before. There is no persistent large editing menu at the top (a la Microsoft Word); instead, there is simply a little “add” icon to create a new block. If you want to format the text in a block, you can click on the block and a floating edit menu will appear. This is fairly slick, because my priority when writing is to have the most minimal set-up as possible. It helps me focus, and I remember enough keyboard commands that persistent buttons are quite a waste of space.
From my brief writing here, there are two key parts of this block system that stand out. First, they were smart enough to allow blocks to be arbitrarily rearranged within a document. On the left side of a block are up and down arrows, as well as a “grab” area where you can simply drag a block where you want it. While I don’t frequently find myself moving blocks of text all over the place, I can imagine this being quite useful for people who post photos or other media on their blog regularly. Being able to quickly toss the media in, then rearrange at will (without the need for cut and paste) is pretty slick.
The second aspect is Reusable Blocks. These are “custom blocks” you can create, save, and use in other posts. While this particular blog of mine doesn’t need them, I can imagine they will be quite useful for OHAC posts, as each has very common links at the beginning which so far, I’ve just copied and pasted from previous posts. Being able to have consistent formatting rules without needing to load up a previous post should be quite nice.
How exactly these Reusable blocks work is unclear. When I create one in this document, then try to do something else, the editor crashes immediately. So I rewrote the “Reusable Block” paragraph about 5 times. However, each time I did that it saved the block I created. I can go and insert it now. I’ll poke around and see how I can create them outside of a post editor; I don’t want to test the waters too much.
When I first logged onto WordPress a couple of weeks ago and they were heavily pushing this block editor, I was very skeptical. So much writing over the past few years has been done in LaTeX, and I haven’t been a fan of WYSIWYG editors for a long time. However, I don’t feel like writing in raw HTML, so I think this block editor will be good moving forward.