Feedback Thread for the Block Editor
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I’ve really been struggling with the block editor, to the degree that I just had to switch back to classic.
– In the classic editor, when I’m editing visually, there is a good preview in situ. What I see in the block editor barely resembles the result, and you’ve got to open an entire separate window for a preview. This is a time-consuming and frustrating process.
– The situation is even worse if you’re applying custom styles, which are not rendered in the block editor at all.
– Why must blocks be P elements, and not DIV elements that could contain multiple paragraphs? This is such a fundamentally puzzling choice that I don’t know how to explain it.
– As for being able to edit a block in HTML mode, that’s a joke. Any modification I make to a tag (e.g., adding a style rule) is immediately stripped out by the editor. WTF?
– Inserting a floating image has become painful. No matter where you have your insertion point, the image block gets pushed onto the end of the document, and you have to hover over and press an up button until it arrives where you want it.
– And what is it with the title field in the block editor being SO HUGE?
– Perhaps it’s the fault of the theme I’m using, but I simply can’t override some CSS rules with my custom stylesheet. I’ve added every rule I could think of to remove text decoration from links (text-decoration: none !important) and nothinig works. Not only that, but there’s an a:hover rule somewhere that draws a border underneath the existing text decoration. It’s hideous. I thought I’d been able to tweak the theme more directly in the old interface, but perhaps not. There’s certainly no setting for link decoration in the Design area.
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I know I can use the classic editor but it keeps switching back and forth – forcing me to continuously tell it to use classic editor. In the new editor there is no way to use special characters which are prevalent in other languages.
For me the worst feature of the new editor is inserting photos. Since a lot of my blog contains photos, I like the old way. Now when you add an image, you don’t even go to the media gallery where your photos are stored. It automatically inserts the photo in the post and not always in the right place either. When I want to do a photo collage, which was fairly easy in the classic editor, I’m going to have to do it a completely different way. Often I pick the photos I want to use in a post in advance, and put them all in the media gallery to facilitate putting them where I want them. Sometimes I don’t end up using all of them, and it was easy to delete the ones I didn’t use. Now whatever photo I choose is inserted immediately. The only way to get it out is to use the delete key on my keyboard.
Paraphrasing what another blogger said: “If it ain’t broke,, don’t fix it!” I would like to be able to choose the classic editor, not in each post, but on my dashboard somewhere so that I never have to deal with the block editor at all.
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“If you really want to use the classic editor, it is still available”
staff-blorbo, there are two major problems with that sentence.
The first is to think that the block editor is so good that hardly anyone would think not to use it; this is not the reality.
Second, we do not want the traditional editor to “still” be available, but that it is always available or that the WP makes a clear choice to support editing options for those who write. This has been said since Gutemberg was launched, but there is no answer on the subject.
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Hi MabelAmber: Just wanted to say I totally AGREE with “Kiss” principle of blogging…when I joined WP in 2012 it was awesome! It took me only a few days to figure out how to do a post. And I LOVE having the Media Library at the ready…I LOVE WP As it is & wish they would just leave it alone or offer BOTH Editors so that we can choose!!
I am relieved I’m not the only frustrated person blogging here!
Sherri-Ellen T-D. -
Cheers Sherri-Ellen!
“If you really want to use the classic editor, it is still available”
staff-blorbo, there are two major problems with that sentence.
The first is to think that the block editor is so good that hardly anyone would think not to use it; this is not the reality.
Second, we do not want the traditional editor to “still” be available, but that it is always available or that the WP makes a clear choice to support editing options for those who write
This.
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I switched one of my private blogs to the block editor. Now, if I go to WPAdmin/All Posts, I can choose to edit an existing post in block or classic, but I don’t see a way to start a post in classic. Now in this blog, it seems that if I want to write a post in classic, I have to start it in block, save it, and then go to All Posts to choose classic and start editing again. There doesn’t seem to be a way to just turn the block editor completely off again. Is that true?
And, as someone said above, the title block is completely huge and there doesn’t seem to be anyway to change it.
I am really glad I didn’t try this in my main public blog. It would be awful. A half an hour with the block editor reminded me of why I gave up on it. It is just so completely counter-intuitive.
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With the Classic editor, I write my posts in Markdown using the HTML editor, embed photos using the “Add Media” function, and cut-and-paste the embed code from YouTube to embed videos, turning it into a block of sorts using the div and /div tags. Other embeds (tweets, Instagrams, etc.) are handled the same way. The div and /div tags allow me to center the media in the column rather than pushing them up against the left side, and to size them appropriately (i.e. the way I want them sized). I use “style=” inside tags when needed (increasing or decreasing font size, changing colors, etc.) Easy peasy…
The block editor makes things “easier” how, exactly? It’s like a nuclear screwdriver. You’ve taken the process of writing a blog post and loaded it down with so many bells and whistles that it’s unusable. I have no use for 99% of the blocks you’ve defined, and the other 1% don’t work the way I want them to. I asked one of your “happiness engineers” how to reduce the size of a video and center it in the post, and was told “well, you have to figure out how to do it with HTML and put it in an HTML block.” Well, gee, that’s what I had been doing. Why do I need this dog’s breakfast of blocks to do that?
I understand that you’ve put a lot of work into the block editor and are disappointed that a large percentage of your users hate it, but have you asked yourself why people hate it? Could it be that we’re confronted with a complex and complicated editor that none of us asked for? (Who did ask for it, anyway?) Could it be that you told us three weeks ago that this would be the only editor we’d have as of June 1? (No, you didn’t say that, exactly, but more than a few people heard that. Maybe someone needs to improve their communication skills.) Could it be that, given a choice between the whiz-bang feature-laden block editor and the classic editor, people prefer the latter?
In a very real way, we’re at your mercy. We have to live with the choices you make. This one threw us all for a loop. Please don’t do that to us.
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No Sherri-Ellen you’re right, you’re not the only frustrated person about the Block Editor. I may have been only blogging for a little over 3 years but I love the Classic Editor. So much simpler than block editor. Please let us have our choice. I may have to leave WordPress if you absolutely insist on block editor. It would be so much easier for everyone involved to just give us the choice— Use Classic Editor or The New Block Editor.
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@guitarsophist earlier in this thread I said
Just make sure you’re in the old editor each time you create a new post. Go to WP Admin Posts -All Posts and click the arrow at the side of the “Posts Add New” button at the top left. Then you’ll see a choice of which editor to use.
That still works just fine for me.
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@themagicrobot Ah, you are right, I see that now. When I hadn’t switched any sites to block none of these choices would appear, so the various instructions confused me. Now that I have switched one site, I can see these choices, though they are kind of buried.
I feel sorry for those who are stuck with nothing but the block editor and the classic block.
Thanks!
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The Classic Editor works just fine for people who use WordPress as a way to produce simple standard text and photo blogs. I have been playing with the new block editor and find it overly complicated. In fact just now when I added a two column text block I found it impossible to remove! I ended up going into the code editor and deleting it from there. Not many people actually use code other than programmers, fortunately I used to be one. But now I just need simplicity. I agree that the OPTION to have a different editor is nice for those who like to play with blocks, but please keep it as an option. I like the different collage options for images in the new editor, but I cannot see anywhere to add borders to single images or spacing around images which I use often in my posts. As far as I am concerned I shall carry on using the Classic Editor and I hope it will never be removed.
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Pretty much every post on my blog is a list formatted like so:
Heading
Image
Paragraph
Image
ParagraphAt some point between my last post and now, you guys have made what was previously a very simple process into an absurdly unwieldy chore. In order to start filling out the lists I would first write out all the header lines, format them all as headings, then add lines in between each of them which would automatically default back to paragraph format. I cannot do this in the block format. Everything in the block is forcefully set to the same text style, no matter what. Creating a new block just defaults to the last set style (ie heading) instead. So for every single entry I now need to separately set the heading and paragraph text formats, which is obviously far from ideal.
It would be one thing if this was only applying to the block editor and I could just use the old editor the same way I always have been, but you guys changed that too, and it no longer defaults to paragraph text on new lines like it used to, and it’s also creating these weird line breaks when adding line breaks to text copied from another document, which didn’t used to happen either.On top of that, I can’t even just click where I want to in the block editor either. Any time I click on a line the cursor appears there for a brief moment then drops down to the next line below where I clicked, and I then need to click a second time to get the cursor to move to where I actually want it to, like it would in any other text editor ever made. This is consistent behaviour, and I have to question the sanity of whoever thought it was a good idea.
Please, just leave the editor alone. Every time you guys change it you make it worse.
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You’d think there’d be an edit button on the forum, but apparently not. In any case, turns out I was able to get the old editor to revert back to paragraph formatting on a new line… after first adding line breaks between every line in a text document and then copying that over to the wordpress editor, because apparently moving from the block editor to the classic editor just completely breaks it beyond the classic editor’s ability to repair. So that definitely ensures I won’t bother with the block editor again.
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On a tangential aside here. On my home/start page is the humongous “New Editor, Try It Now Before We Shove It Down Your Throat” ad that I have to look at. There is a button that says “dismiss”. Whenever I click that the ad disappears but the block stays there and the little spinny wheel just spins and spins without ever resolving. And next time I come back to the home/start page, there’s that ad again. Why won’t this go away, permanently?
I am using Chrome 83 (64 bit)
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In all honesty, I’ve found the Classic Editor to be much less buggy than the Block Editor. The more I use Block, the more bugs I discover.
Converting posts from Classic to Block comes with formatting issues, such as too much spacing between headings even though the published page was spaced correctly with Classic. I can only think the Block adds extra coding here and there.
I don’t like that if I need to open a published post, it defaults to Block even though it was created in Classic. It’s the old saying “if it ain’t broke, don’t touch”.
The gallery block is very buggy and find that after adding photos, I need to re-enter information in all the text fields 4 to 5 times, before it actually displays in my Dashboard or Preview. Please fix this bug!
Also, even though I centre the gallery, the gallery’s caption is left justified and looks awful. These are only a couple of bugs I’ve discovered.No, it’s not my Browser cache as I clear this regularly.
It feels as though WP rolled out a platform without testing rigorously and expects users to test for bugs, instead of WP testers to do the testing.
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This is what it says in the right hand side bar of the Classic Editor:
———————————
The Block Editor
is ready when you are.The Block Editor lets you insert,
rearrange, and style
multimedia content to build
your own custom pages and
posts without writing code.———————————
Dear WordPress,
I DON’T WANT to “build” my own “custom pages and posts”.
I am happy for those people who DO want to do that and for whom WP has provided this facility, so that they don’t need to “write code”, but please give us, the folks who ONLY want to WRITE text (because we are writers!) a reason to be happy with WP too, and thus KEEP the Classic Editor.
Thank you humbly in advance,
Mabel Amber
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For those of us who just want to write blog posts, this new editor is like a replay of Beep Beep Boop, the “wonderful new editor” that caused a whole bunch of us to get ready to move from WordPress. That was back in August of 2014. We stayed, but only because WordPress reluctantly — very reluctantly — decided to keep the original editor as an option, referring to it the “classic” editor. Now that the same scenario has returned, it seems that the new editor should be referred to as “Son of Beep Beep Boop.”
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@mabelamber I couldn’t agree more.
And oh, yes I remember well how the “Beep beep boop” made many of us cry!
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You are all probably sick of hearing this over and over now, but…
while the new block system has made it easier to do complicated stuff, it has made it harder to do simple stuff.
In short, many of us expect writing and editing text to
- behave like a word processor.
E.g., type in some text, select some of it, indent, bullet, change the font, etc.
- You have broken the WYSIWYG fundamental model of text for us.
That is close to, I have to say, either bone-headed if not unforgivable. I don’t think you can find any word processing vendors who have had the eureka to take their users out of WYSIWYG text editing and replace it with a page layout paradigm. Which is what you’ve done. The tool you’ve built is optimized for page layout. I don’t care about page layout, my theme handles that for me. I care about text editing, which you have shredded into tiny pieces of pages.
When editing text in a word processor, I don’t need to create a “list” block, then put my list in it. I’m not even sure how to indent now, as the default paragraph block doesn’t have that function built-in. I tried centering some text, but it centered the whole block! Right! because each paragraph is supposed to be its own block. Instead of my post being a continuous piece of text that I can edit and format at will, I have to break it up into small chunks and dork with each of them separately.
And somehow you all don’t see what a bungle that is? I’m working hard to use blocks, but the whole process is now way harder. And all sorts of weird side-effects with themes.
- But that’s OK because I can customize everything with my own .css!
Ahahahaha! Isn’t that statement prima-facia obviously a fail?
Look, I’m sure that all the users who demoed this in Beta were your more advanced users. They are probably ecstatic. I also understand how hard it is to control even basic formatting with vanilla HTML, and your users were probably driving you crazy all day, every day. I have had to build page layout and document formatting tools, I completely understand.
I would be great if you could slightly separate those two functions, at least for us writers. A WYSIWYG block editor (I don’t care if it is the classic block or some new cool block), and then sure, tools for people who want to control page layout and formatting more than the rest of us.
Peace.
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