Like many, I’ve been watching warily as WordPress 5 pushes the new Gutenberg editor onto us. I’ve been watching not only as a person who uses WordPress regularly, but as a person who administers and supports two big WordPress Multisite installations (UCI Sites and Faculty Websites). What would this mean for our user base? How hard would it be to use and would we have a user revolt?

Luckily, the Classic Editor plugin made it easy to make it an opt-in solution. We installed and enabled it on our WordPress installations. It is set as the default. We have instructions letting our users know how to enable it via Settings > Writing.

I also wrote a Gutenberg Guide. The new Help Center documents go through the basics including each new block. Writing the user guide forced me to use each block. What surprised me is that I have grown to like it. When I use the Classic Editor now, it feels slow and clunky.

It doesn’t replace Beaver Builder, but it is a useful improvement to the Classic Editor. If you haven’t tried it yet, I’d give it a shot. You may come to like it as much as I do.