Thoughts about gutenberg integration

The Gutenberg plugin which includes the next generation post editor for WordPress, about to be released in version 5.0, has already gained 200k active sites which makes it impossible to ignore it. (As we supportĀ  to integrate our widget with any other page-builder plugins.)

We were lying low in hope that someone else will be nice enough to lead the way by example, but so far we do not see anything we actually like about how functionality like ours is being integrated with it.

It does not help at all that at this point in time the community is very fractured and many people avoid the use of Gutenberg by installing the “classic editor” plugin, which means that we need to support both editing flows.

Please use the new Gutenberg editor with our widget

Looking at how Gutenberg handles things like the recent posts block left us not impressed at all. We still believe that the natural place to control the front end aspects of something like this is in the customizer, and the way you need to go to the Gutenberg sidebar to configure the block settings and then to preview in another window is just not a great UX, much worse than our customizer focused workflow.

So we are still waiting for an inspiration for better use of a block for something like our widgets and have no plans right now to release a version with a block before Gutenberg will be officially added to WordPress core.

Meanwhile, we have tested the plugin with Gutenberg, and you can use either the shortcode block or the classic block (preferred IMO as it has the helper buttons to generate the shortcode) to insert the shortcode, and it should work in the same way it does with the “classic editor”.

More about page-builder integration:

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