There’s no doubt that website hosting platforms such as WordPress have revolutionised business marketing over the last decade or so. The ability to create compelling content and easily load it onto your website not only makes things easy for marketers and newbies alike but also encourages better content in the long term.
The Gutenberg update is currently being developed and is designed to make producing rich block content for your website a breeze. The new web content manager has received some poor reviews so far but it’s still in the development stage and hopefully the bugs and problems are gradually being ironed out.
If it works properly, the big benefit the Gutenberg editor will bring is that those with little or no HTML or coding expertise will be able to achieve better looking content with more dynamic blocks and layout options. Once properly developed, it will be added to the standard WordPress download and will be available to everyone.
You can choose to download Gutenberg as a beta plug-in now rather than wait, and you’ll be given a choice of using that or the standard editor, so if you encounter any problems it’s easy to toggle between the two.
- Gutenberg does currently give you more writing space than the old screen which is good for anyone working on a small tablet or notebook computer. You can also remove the sidebar.
- The text editor allows you to create blocks of text and you can position these on the page quite easily.
- You can also create text and table blocks and for more advanced users there’s going to be HTML blocks where you can insert the code of your choice and see it in real time before you publish.
- The editor also comes with some new visual styles which give users the option to develop more interesting looking sites along with a number of autocomplete facilities to make working with blocks of text quicker.
- For those writing long articles, a Table of Contents has been added which means you can quickly jump to the place you want to work on without having to scroll down large amounts of text. You can also use blocks as anchor text.
- You have the option to add a simple button to encourage people to click to the next stage of the buying process and it’s expected these will be developed more in the future.
- The developers have made it much easier to embed other content like YouTube videos.
So far the pros and cons have varied as the Gutenberg Editor is being more fully developed. For content marketers it certainly provides better streamlining when it comes to editing and producing content. There’s the option to create interesting blocks of text as well as a better facility for handling pasted content. Overall, it should provide a good platform for both new users and businesses, where HTML and coding is at the bare minimum, as well as more experienced CMS marketers.
On the downside, it’s still in the development stage so is currently missing important attributes like markdown support or responsive columns. If you’re a fan of the SEO management tool from Yoast, the bad news is that this isn’t currently supported and that raises the issue of backward compatibility for a range of existing and past plug-ins.
On the whole, the jury is still out on Guttenberg, and progress is a little slower than most people had hoped. For any serious content manager, having inbuilt WYSIWYG capability that reduces the need for coding expertise not only saves time but is a lot more convenient and provides novices with the ability to create interesting web pages with little or no tech knowledge. If WordPress can solve the backwards compatibility issues and provide a system to allow users to opt in and out of using Guttenberg rather than forcing it on everyone, then it may prove to be a useful WordPress addition. Let’s see what happens…