I logged into ye olde WordPress blog this morning and discovered a giant new splash box on my dashboard that proclaimed WordPress’ spiffy new Gutenberg editor ready for me to play with. And y’all, I think I’m in love. I want to cuddle this thing in my arms like a tiny kitten and sing it little songs while it purrs.
I’ve been using WordPress almost since it debuted and it has been, hands down, my favorite way to build and use a website every day since I first flipped on the open sign on my first real website.
There’s almost nothing you can’t do with WordPress. You can make it look like anything you want with relative ease, providing you know just a smidge of code, and you can make it handle just about any kind of content you want. I don’t actually need a website to do much, but man, I love the freedom of knowing I could do anything if I wanted or needed to.
WordPress has been basically the same critter for fifteen years now. There’s been some surface changes. There’s been under-the-hood code changes. But for the user, firing up WordPress has been mostly the same the whole time. What change there’s been has been relatively minor and incremental.
Gutenberg is a whole new thing.
Gutenberg is a drag & drop editor.
Gutenberg brings drag and drop editing and page building to WordPress for the first time. There’ve been plugins that had added a similar functionality, but those have been less than stellar. Gutenberg is baked in and seems to work really, really well. It brings advanced editing and layout to even the non-codiest of non-coders, as easily as clicking a button.
All the fancy crap I might have wanted to do with a post or page that I would have had to spend two or three hours building in CSS by hand before I can now do in about five minutes.
And if I really need to get into the code, or customize something specifically, Gutenberg will let me do that, too.
I mean look at this. I can slap a pullquote in this easily, no coding required. I just clicked a button and started typing.
– Me.
I’ve already added two different photos here – a regular photo and the cover image with the text. I could customize both of those, too, if I wanted – different text colors and fonts on the image, resizing, all that, on the fly, hardly a bit of HTML or CSS needed.
I can slap in video, audio, or any type of embed, like the YouTube video above, with two clicks of a button. (Well, and some sorting through menus, because I don’t know where everything is yet.)
I can add separate columns of text, in case I ever wanted to do that. For reasons. Who knows? But I can!
Look, this is a column! Have some lorem ipsum:
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Quisque non leo mauris. Quisque bibendum ac magna sed tristique. In vel justo interdum, molestie massa ac, ultricies magna. Maecenas eget dui nibh. Orci varius natoque penatibus et magnis dis parturient montes, nascetur ridiculus mus. Sed ac vestibulum augue. Aenean sed consequat odio, a suscipit ante.
Here’s a second column! With more lorem ipsum!
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Quisque non leo mauris. Quisque bibendum ac magna sed tristique. In vel justo interdum, molestie massa ac, ultricies magna. Maecenas eget dui nibh. Orci varius natoque penatibus et magnis dis parturient montes, nascetur ridiculus mus. Sed ac vestibulum augue. Aenean sed consequat odio, a suscipit ante.
Holy cow. I’d have had to fight with that for an hour before. I mean, it probably doesn’t look that great, because the WordPress theme I’m using doesn’t play well with Gutenberg’s capabilities, but that’s pretty easy to fix.
I think Gutenberg and I are going to be great friends.
And now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to go play with my new toys.
Notes & Thoughts 
