WordPress is the go-to editor for the most amount of websites on the world wide web. OxGadgets runs on it as well. Ever since we have been around (over 5 years now), we have been using WordPress
It’s all blocks!
The cover image below? A block – which allows you to add an image and then add text to it!
Of Mountains & Printing Presses
What you are reading now is a text block, the most basic block of all. The text block has its own controls to be moved freely around the post…
… like this one, which is right aligned.
Headings are separate blocks as well, which helps with the outline and organization of your content.
A Picture is worth a Thousand Words
Handling images and media with the utmost care is a primary focus of the new editor. Among the blocks, you will find aspects of adding captions or going full-width with your pictures much easier and robust than before.
Captions are more intelligent than ever. Just select and adjust them. No need to worry about accidentally messing up text.
The Inserter Tool
Imagine everything that WordPress can do is available to you quickly and in the same place on the interface. No need to figure out HTML tags, classes, or remember complicated shortcode syntax. That’s the spirit behind the inserter—the (+) button you’ll see around the editor—which allows you to browse all available content blocks and add them into your post. Plugins and themes are able to register their own, opening up all sort of possibilities for rich editing and publishing.
If you give it a try, you may discover things WordPress can already add into your posts that you didn’t know about. Here’s a short list of what you can currently find there:
- Text & Headings
- Images & Videos
- Galleries
- Embeds, like YouTube, Tweets, or other WordPress posts.
- Layout blocks, like Buttons, Hero Images, Separators, etc.
- And Lists like this one of course 🙂
Visual Editing
A huge benefit of blocks is that you can edit them in place and manipulate your content directly. Instead of having fields for editing things like the source of a quote, or the text of a button, you can directly change the content. Try editing the following quote:
The editor will endeavour to create a new page and post building experience that makes writing rich posts effortless, and has “blocks” to make it easy what today might take shortcodes, custom HTML, or “mystery meat” embed discovery.
Matt Mullenweg, 2017
The information corresponding to the source of the quote is a separate text field, similar to captions under images, so the structure of the quote is protected even if you select, modify, or remove the source. It’s always easy to add it back.
Blocks can be anything you need. For instance, you may want to add a subdued quote as part of the composition of your text, or you may prefer to display a giant stylized one. All of these options are available in the inserter.
You can change the amount of columns in your galleries by dragging a slider in the block inspector in the sidebar.
Media Rich
If you combine the new wide and full-wide alignments with galleries, you can create a very media rich layout, very quickly:
Sure, the full-wide image can be pretty big. But sometimes the image is worth it.
The above is a gallery with just two images. It’s an easier way to create visually appealing layouts, without having to deal with floats. You can also easily convert the gallery back to individual images again, by using the block switcher.
Any block can opt into these alignments. The embed block has them also, and is responsive out of the box:
You can build any block you like, static or dynamic, decorative or plain. Here’s a pullquote block:
Code is Poetry
The WordPress community
What about HTML?
Sure – the new editor is awesome, but what about sorting through HTML? WordPress have thought of it as well. Every block allows you to edit the html when you highlight it using the mouse. Just hover your mouse over a block, and three buttons appear on the side.
When you press the button, you get further options.
From here you can edit as HTML. This just turns your text into good old fashioned HTML.
The problem being that you may have to deal with things on a paragraph by paragraph basis. However, for most of us who just need to check links and such like, this shouldn’t be too much of an issue.
Does the normal wordpress search function filter out all those wp:whatever comments in HTML or is every post with any Gutenberg heading block returned if somebody searches your blog for “head” or similar?
You’re welcome to try this post, as it was written with it
The word “Heading” appears in your post as regular text, so trying this here does not make sense.
It would be interesting to know if a post shows up in search result for “head” if not the word “Heading” is used in it but only a heading block.
Ah fair.
when you paste writing word doc content. i get codes. how do i remove that.
That’s very interesting. I have not had that problem when I have tried. Have you tried copy pasting paragraph by paragraph?
Probably depends on how the Word doc is formatted, because different formatting definitely pastes differently into WordPress, even the classic editor.