Have you checked your WordPress Blogs lately?

Gutenberg (taken from the Gutenberg Press) editor will be changing your site.  Built by GitHub, it adds greater versatility for you. If you don’t want this to happen, you must take action and click on the hyperlink for classic editor version.

The new editor changes your experience, making your pages and posts rich with media and blocks which change how you build your site. It is currently available as a plugin but will be a default in version 5.0 of WordPress.

Blocks help build engaging content.  You’re enabled to insert, resort and style multimedia content without being well-versed in HTML or technical knowhow. Rather than using a code system, you simply add a block and focus on the content you want to post. Construct your site with a reliable, succinct block or add more with various media inserts.

GitHub explains blocks this way:

#Blocks are higher-level than HTML

Blocks are a helpful tool to describe how to edit content that goes beyond simple text, but they don’t carry much meaning once the final page has been generated and is consumed as an HTML document. Even though the end result is HTML in a browser, a “block” connotes more meaning than the HTML it generates. That extra meaning is what enables the rich editing experience, as it allows the application to include tools to help the user craft the content they want. The HTML is augmented with the editing tools. For many blocks, the HTML produced is incidental, and subject to change. Blocks can be powerful and significantly more complex than the HTML they produce.

The problem an editor like Gutenberg faces is that once things have been transformed into HTML, there’s no inherent meaning anymore in the HTML markup from which to construct a specific block interface back. That means the HTML content can be ambiguous: the same markup can correspond to entirely different blocks. One consequence of this fact is that it demonstrates how we have lost meaning when we move down to HTML alone. So there needs to be a reliable way to know a block type without having to understand HTML.

Additionally, how do we even know this came from our editor? Maybe someone snuck it in by hand when trying to quickly jump in and change the page. The structure of the higher-level meaning is implicit and indistinguishable from the same markup when entered manually. When Gutenberg operates on a block, it knows its type and attributes without inspecting the HTML source.”

During publishing, blocks remain in memory, representing a structure of objects and attributes.

“Gutenberg relies on a structure-preserving data model so that the editors and views for specific block types can remain independent from the final rendered HTML. It’s a tree similar to how HTML is a tree, though at the top-level it’s just a list of nodes—it needs no “root node”.The tree of objects describes the list of blocks that compose a post.”

Until Gutenberg is rolled out, you can give it a whirl and see what you think.  They are looking for feedback and it may be just the thing you’ve been looking for!

Come back on Thursday when we highlight another new tip.  See you then!