Block editor a regression?
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I’ve persevered with the Block Editor (after years of getting used to Classic editor). There are some aspects of it I like. But ultimately it seems less flexible in terms of fine-tuning the blog post’s appearance. To the point of being clumsy.
For, example, my recent blog post had a brief series of quotes interspersed with my comments. In one case, one quote followed immediately after another, without any commentary by me between.
Easy enough to create – but the result looked awful. Typographically a mess, since the quoted sections automatically had larger font size than my comments. And each quote had a separating line before and after (which looked a bit silly with one after another). I seem to have no way to control these elements. There is very little choice on quote style.
So, finally, I just deleted the lot, and created separate “Classic” style blocks – enabling me to format the quotes properly, manually using text indenting. A lot of work. I got there in the end, with no help from the Block Editor.
The blog I need help with is: (visible only to logged in users)
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Hi there,
You are referring to your recent post https://rawsemantics.home.blog/2021/07/05/23-sleepcoin-miner-ad/ yes?
If I can ask, which bit of formatting were you not able to accomplish with blocks? The quoted section using the preformatted computer text? Or the section below that with the quotes in red text?
By default your theme will have built in styles (which blocks like the Quote Block will leverage) that control the style and appearance of things. The designer of the theme can’t envision all uses though so they might not have accounted for the specific formatting you were using in your post.
However, if you find that you prefer that your quoted text be formatted a specific way, and don’t want to create them manually each time, there are a few suggestions I have:
1) upgrade to the Premium plan and use CSS code (an option included in the plan) to override the default theme quote style with your own.
2) without upgrading, you can save your special formatting as “reusable blocks” which would give you a handy way to save the formatting for reuse later: https://wordpress.com/support/wordpress-editor/blocks/reusable-block/#edit-a-reusable-block
Note: The classic block cannot be made re-usable but you can reuse a “group” of blocks. With that in mind, if you save a classic block as a group, you can then make that group (and the classic block within) reusable as well: https://wordpress.com/support/wordpress-editor/blocks/group-block/
Hope that helps. Please let us know if you have any more questions.
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Thanks for your reply – and I will look into your suggestion of ‘reusable blocks’.
The problematic part of my post was the bottom half with quotes in red-brown text. The theme I use provided ease and flexibility in the old Classic editor mode. The results always seemed attractive and typographically balanced.
Not so with the new Block editor. It simply does not provide the flexibility with quotes (and a few other things – indenting text, etc). Frankly, the quotes I originally inserted with Block Editor looked a mess (because, as I mentioned above, of the imposed large font size and separator lines which can’t be removed in Block Editor quote mode).
What I’m trying to say is that the Block editor has made the theme I use less attractive, flexible and easy to use – for fairly simple things. (I ended up having to redo a large part of it by manually creating Classic editor text blocks. This feels like simulating an older version of a program because the newer version is a regression in certain important ways).
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To clarify: in the old Classic editor mode, in a lot of cases the quotes I used were simply text I indented, centred and colored manually, rather than pressing on the “quote” button in the text editing panel. The point is that I could switch between either (manual indent vs auto quote) quickly and compare the results using the Classic editing panel (ie all from that panel). This is made more difficult and clumsy in Block Editor, with options such as indenting text unavailable.
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Thank you for all the feedback.
I had a look at the quotes on your post and, since you prefer to style them manually, I’d suggest using Paragraph Block instead. You can achieve the same look without the need to use the Classic Block (although I understand that you feel more comfortable with that).
You will be able to change the alignment, text color, background color, font size. Here’s some more information about that:https://wordpress.com/support/wordpress-editor/blocks/paragraph-block/.
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Ah, thanks. I think I tried that first, in fact.
But I couldn’t indent text that way. (My preference is to indent quotes).
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