Kill it before it kills WordPress (2)
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UPDATE – WordPress Gutenberg Editor – Extensive Test and Review
IN SHORT
People will not Read The Fantastic Manual (aka #RTFM). So, I didn’t do so either. I have 30+ years of experience as an IT professional, 20+ years as a programmer, webdeveloper and webhoster. Besides running a webhosting company I also work as an applications manager at a City Hall. Testing software has been one of my tasks for many years. For three years I’ve worked as a testmanager in a national (Dutch) project. So I’d say I’m capable of running software tests and ran a series of tests that every live program should be able to handle correct. I’m sorry to inform you, Gutenberg couldn’t.
FULL TEST RESULTS
Here are the results after testing a lot of stuff in Gutenberg. I made a video of the testprocess but cannot link to it on WordPress Forum since this isn’t allowed. It’s on Youtube, search for “WordPress Gutenberg Editor – Extensive Test and Review!” to be able to see what I’m talking about below.
USE CASES
For this test I used basic use cases.
— posting a new article (writing an article, copy-paste from a text editor)
— editing an existing article (post, page).
— Convert an existing post to Gutenberg and edit it.
— installing and updating plugins, afterwards testing (regression test)
— creating a new media-rich post (images, video).
— editing pages created with a site builderTESTCOMPUTER
— Linux Mint 18.3
— FireFox 61.0.1 64-bit, Chromium 68.0.3440.106
— CPU: Intel i3/550 3.2Ghz;
— RAM: 16GBWEBSITES
— Website on a live Linux server (Linux Debian 8, PHP 7.x, MariaDB, 16GB RAM, 4-core and so on);
— Website hosted on a XAMPP local server (on my testcomputer).The first test I did was on a live site, by accident! I installed Gutenberg. There was no way back. When I started editing, it was totally messed up so I had to restore the site. I was pissed off and wrote on the Gutenberg project page some feedback under the title “Kill it before it kills WordPress”.. I was asked to be more specific. So I several tests based on the use cases above.
Because I wanted to document this whole Gutenberg thing better I used a screen recorder and posted it on Youtube.
TESTING ENVIRONMENTS
1. a basic “test installation” of WordPress, updated to latest version before testing;
2. a copy of a live site, on my local machine (XAMPP).The below are the results of the testing.
PRO’S
— Seems to be working with a standard template;
— Old posts can be edited. It will show the classic editor;
— converting old posts and pages to the new editor basicly works;
— Shortcodes are in a separate block and still work.CON’S / TEST REMARKS
— alignment of images is not correct. The header image is fine (full width), other images aligned right or left do align to the borders of the post, but inline posts of images at full width/center do not align full width but are smaller.
— Editor is not a true WYSIWYG editor
— hard to decide if text is a header or not (SEO!?) when using the “text settings” buttons. Why are they here in the first place? Since if you add new blocks it defaults (so it seems) to a header (at least, it does sometimes.. but not always. This is unstable).
— [publish] button only works when you click outside first block you’re editing. Only after that you can publish..
— to publish you need to click on the publish button twice(!!). That is pretty awkward. If you ask me this indicates there’s a programming issue with this function or probably a design decision that is, if you ask me, in error. When publishing content (save content), you should not need to click twice to do so.
— pages are now also named ‘posts’.. why? Very weird. Clearly there’s a difference between pages and posts, so don’t use the same name for this.
— HTML editing: you cannot access HTML for the full page but only for one block. This should be full page HTML since that would make search/replace easier (as it was before). For example for URL’s in a post. It’s what you expect when editing HTML. This is a design decision based on some assumption on how people work with text and WordPress making it harder to use for designers and writers.
— the “button bar” above posts should stay as it was in the classic editor, do not move stuff to the sidebar. Very disturbing for the workflow. Many options are now very hard to find, some are (still) missing. Some options that were at the side of a post in the classic editor setup are now extremely hard to find or perhaps gone? I haven’t been able to find them or only after searching long and hard. The bar above posts is as most wordprocessors work. Keep it that way, since it’s what people are familiar with!
— When editing colors you cannot use HEX code(?). So it’s impossible to get the exact same colors in your pages/posts as used in the theme.
— some buttons make you think they have certain functions, but they don’t. Like the “undo” button. I was mistaken it for a “back” button…
— Preview sometimes totally messes up your website. It shows something in between the mobile version of the website and a website that has been messed up badly.
— the featured image all of the sudden has a line around it when posting to a news page — older posts didn’t have this. So it interferes with the theme settings (CSS?) after all.. It doesn’t add this line around previous posts featured image.
— converting an existing page (with images) to the new format destroys the layout. Images that were aligned, for example, right or left, are now centered. It also resizes the images (so previous settings have gone lost as far as size is concerned). If you have a lot of images on a page, this is a pesky task setting them back to the original size, if even possible since you don’t know what the original settings were.
— installing a new plugin. The functionality (Gallery) is totally ignored by Gutenbgerg
— No options to use the ‘gallery’ as a real gallery (as in “pop-out”);
— The gallery functio in Gutenberg defaults to settings that are outdated and ugly imho. But using the plugin has been made impossible.
— When combining pictures with video (Youtube) they do not align correct. Gallery = full width, video is not. I have not found an option to resize the video size in a post. In the Gutenberg Editor, however, it looks fine. On the published post it doesn’t, it’s pretty ugly..
— The text below a video does not align centered, even when the block is clicked ‘center’ alignment. It centers on the page, but the video doesn’t. The border around the video is, however, full width.. Clearly a design programming error.
— the embed code doesn’t have any options (that I know off) to change the size of a youtube video. While Gutenberg aims to not bother people with HTML (good idea) in this case it should be more robust or allow me to do true HTML editing to fix this issue.
Overall
— hard and often very awkward to use, not user friendly;
— lot’s of extra clicking. That’s obsolete! It also shows there are programming issues that need to be fixed.
— still many issues and bugs (do not take my word for it, check the support pages and Github);
— I simply do not like how it works and ‘feels’. It disturbs my workflow;
— It is very unclear what the “editing area” is. The classic editor was giving you a “page” feel where you could edit.
— For writing a piece of text it is unsuitable. As a ‘design tool’ not there yet, not by far.FINAL THOUGHTS
The project is, if you ask me, a waste of time. Smart developers as well as webdesigners and users can use there limited time and resources a lot more effective. Many have spend numerous hours on this project. Building, testing, giving feedback. So far, most feedback is, imho, ignored.
Wordpress would have been better off if the developers spend their time on developing a more robust WordPress core code, fixing security isses, bugs or adding new functions. As the saying goes: “Don’t fix what ain’t broeken”. The editor isn’t broken. The classic editor is what it is and it does a good job. This overhaul of WordPress is not the right direction for wordpress if you ask me. But that’s just my two cents,.. I’m afraid I’ve wasted a lot of time running these tests. I can only repeat what I’ve said before: “Kill it, before it Kills WordPress”. It ain’t ready, the majority of WordPress users are not asking for it. I can only repeat myself: “Kill it, before it kills WordPress”.
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(old review)
Do NOT make it the default editor!!
I’ve installed the new editor, and after trying to create a post with it I stopped and rushed to the plugin section and REMOVED it straight away.
If we want media-rich design tools, there are enough good plugins. DON’T do this to the average joe who is writing blog posts or just manages his company or hobby website with WordPress. It’s a terrible editor, it looks terrible and is NOT user friendly.
As far as I’m concerned: kill this project before it kills WordPress.
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When the editor starts, it doesn’t look like an editor at all. You have a ‘heading’ line and .. nothing. No space to write your article (not at first). It just doesn’t look like an editor. It doesn’t even look like a page builder. It’s something in between, cluttered, messy.. not intuitive at all.
Beginners will look at it and will be even more puzzled than those who do have experience in working with WordPress. It was an editor. Keep it that way. If you don’t and make it default, people will run from WordPress. They simply won’t know what to do. I, at first, didn’t either. And I’m a very experienced user!
I think most comments here make it clear. As I said: Kill this project. Save yourself the time and effort to develop it even further more. If this will be the default editor, people will replace it with a plugin or even abandon WordPress. New users won’t even bother trying to understand how this works.. The fact alone that almost 60% of the people who reviewed it give it 1 star or less says it all I think. You’re taking the wrong turn. As an optional plugin: fine. As part of the core? Ludicrous!!
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Oh, for the record: I’ve been working as an IT employee, including software tester and functional management, for almost 30 years. I programmed software (Pascal, Delphi) and currently work as an applications manager and own a hosting- and webdesign company with well over 1,000 clients. I’ve created well over 100 websites the past years using WordPress.Oh, btw.. here’s a suggestion to the developers.
1. make it part of the core app on WordPress.com first. See what happens when you bug people with this “upgrade”.
2. did it ever occur to you that WordPress is used by many companies, small businesses, private users and so on that just want a functional platform to publish their website a.k.a. content. They’re not looking for a load of (non working) fancy stuff.
And finally — why don’t you ask people who give out 5-star ratings what they think is so amazing ..? You only ask people who give ‘bad’ ratings what is wrong. But I’ve read some of the 5-star “reviews” and they are even worse than the negative feedback. They don’t tell you at all what they like so much about it. That would make me, as a programmer, very suspicious.
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