Gutenberg feedback from efpunter
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Feedback on the use of Gutenberg in WordPress.com.
Theme – Independent Publisher 2
Document. I deliberately chose my largest document (~21K words), so not your typical size of post / page; with images from the media library; a handcrafted table of contents with links to take the user directly to each section; some shortcodes for a number of Getty Images that are used; and a handful of bordered sections which display information which does not readily fit with the general flow of the text.
Observations
Overall, the experience was not as bad as some people might lead you to believe. There again, I have been tinkering with Gutenberg as a WordPress.org user for a while so that was obviously an advantage for me.
Text colour in headings. I use colour in some headings, principally when a theme doe not make a good enough job (in my opinion) of differentiating between levels. This is easy to do in the classic editor but I cannot see a way to do it in Gutenberg, without diving into CSS.
Handcrafted table of contents. The conversion to blocks removed my labels (HTML anchors). I guess that it did not like the way that I had originally defined them, although they work ok in documents created via the classic editor. I have worked out what format the Gutenberg editor expects, and I have started to modify my existing table of contents accordingly so that Gutenberg will convert them ok.
The shortcodes worked fine.
The bordered sections had been implemented by using the HTML .. . From memory, I think that I found this method on WordPress.com Support. The converter removed the and and tended to split the content into multiple separate blocks, e.g. where there was a bit of text followed by a list, it produced a paragraph block and a list block. By using “the edit in HTML” facility I was able to recreate these bordered sections. It is a bit messy but fortunately there are only a small number of them.
Performance. Obviously, it can be affected by many things, e.g. the network and the load on the WordPress.com servers. The figures below should therefore be taken with a slight pinch of salt, but they do serve to give an indication of likely performance. Gutenberg has to do a lot more processing than the classic editor, and hence longer response times are inevitable. This may hardly be noticeable on modestly sized posts but they are in this extreme instance. My only gripe is that the editor gives no indication that it is working, leading to the “did I really click on that .. should I click it again” syndrome. Some sort of work in progress message would be good for lengthy processing.
Some timings.
Load 21k word page into the classic editor ~2 secs
Load 21K word page into the Gutenberg editor, resulting in a single classic block ~ 8 secs
Convert 21K word page with a single classic block into multiple blocks ~ 24 seconds
User views 21K words page created in the classic editor ~ 2 secs
User views 21K words page in blocks created in the Gutenberg editor ~ 7 seconds.Re the size of this document, I had in fact already decided to split it up into multiple pages (a) because it can be sluggish to display it in WordPress 4.x and (b) I had already decided that response times would perforce be greater in Gutenberg. Currently, the largest page is about 8.5K words. The time to convert this page to blocks comes down to around 10 seconds.
The blog I need help with is: (visible only to logged in users)
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Hi there, Thanks for the detailed feedback. You can also leave feedback on Gutenberg by taking the survey at https://wordpressdotorg.polldaddy.com/s/gutenberg-support
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Note – bordered section comments. It should say div and /div after HTML on the first line. I put the < and > in but they appear to have disappeared!?
justjennifer. Thanks I will take the survey.
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