This is Kris with a big confession. It’s time to update our website. We use WordPress to create our website. There are two basic pieces to WordPress: how the site “looks” and how you “edit” your information. While we still like the look of the website, it just doesn’t work anymore with all the different devices that access the Internet nowadays. Think computer, laptop, tablet, and smartphone. Our theme (the look) just doesn’t play well with different devices.
Lucky for us, just as we were thinking about how and what to update, WordCamp came to Sacramento. I went to two days of talks about the back end, the front end, and Gutenberg. Wait – what? That’s right. It seems that not only do we still have to wade through thousands of templates to find the look we want, we’ll now have to improve our site using the new editor called Gutenberg. Let me explain.
Gutenberg – The Who
(1400-1468)
Yep, I’m talking about that Gutenberg, Johannes to be precise, born in 1400 in my old university town of Mainz. I attended the Johannes Gutenberg-Universität twice in the 1980s (wow, that was a while ago – see below!) and have fond memories of my time there. It was this Gutenberg who brought movable type to Europe and revolutionized not only the printing industry but mass communication in general. I still remember the first time I saw a Gutenberg Bible. Just breathtaking on so many levels.
Gutenberg – The What
WordPress 5.0 will completely change the look of the editor. As I am typing this post, I have a workspace in front of me into which the entire post resides. With the Gutenberg editor, I will be using “blocks” of information. One block for the post title, one block for the first part of the post, and yet another one for each image. It will make it easier to move the various parts around. I went to one session at WordCamp where people were already showing some types of blocks they were creating for the new editor: an image slide carousel, pie charts (those were cool), and countdown numbers. More visuals, fewer words. That is the essence of the Internet, no?
Gutenberg – The Why
Don’t get me wrong. I love the fact that WordPress named its new editor Gutenberg. With WordPress 5.0 (you can actually start using Gutenberg now), WordPress aims to revolutionize how we create websites, making what seems a daunting task into child’s play with building blocks. Once WordPress rolls out the final phase (there are three planned phases), we will also be able to build our entire site within WordPress.
We at Pixeladies can’t wait that long, but we’re willing to use Gutenberg now. Will it revolutionize editing like Gutenberg did with printing? I’m not so sure. We already use MailChimp to send out newsletters, and – Flash News! – we use blocks to create the newsletters. Hmm. Maybe it is like Gutenberg. After all, the Chinese had movable type way before Gutenberg, but he got all the glory. I hope WordPress is right and that the Gutenberg editor will lessen the time we spend managing our website. That’s more time for creating art, and who wouldn’t want that?
2 responses to “Tech Tueday: The Pixeladies, WordPress & Gutenberg”
[…] Lamark WordPress theme, which uses the Elementor page builder. You’d think, if you had read our blog post about the new Gutenberg WordPress Editor, that we would be using that instead. Well, it is apparently not ready for prime time, and we […]
[…] years back, WordPress introduced its block editor and called it Gutenberg. (You might like to read our post about Gutenberg – the WordPress editor and the historical person.) As we got accustomed to using the […]