Gutenberg: block based editing coming to WordPress soon

Some Trail Websites customers are now using the Elementor page builder for enhanced page layouts and widgets that make complex pages easier to create. Others use the WordPress editor and use WordPress galleries to add nicely organized groups of images.

All WordPress sites will soon have another option. Gutenberg is the project name for an effort to add a block based editor to WordPress. The current version of WordPress (4.9.8 at time of writing) offers Gutenberg or the option to continue with what is now called the classic editor. It also offers the option to install the classic editor plugin which will keep the classic editor after WordPress 5 is released with Gutenberg as the default editor.

Trail Websites has been testing Gutenberg and looks forward to its release. Many of our customers will benefit from the enhanced ability to layout their pages and posts using building blocks. Some will still need more advanced page builders like Elementor but many will find Gutenberg sufficient for their needs.

As Gutenberg becomes more common we will be exploring whether and how it makes sense to offer some of the Trail Data Manager shortcode based functionality as blocks for Gutenberg. For example, if you need a list of all of your conservation holdings as buttons on the bottom of a page, it probably makes sense to be able to drag in a block that does the same thing as the tws_holdings shortcode so you don’t have to remember the shortcode names. For the layout of the entire page of a single holding, we’ll continue to use Toolset Layouts or Elementor templates although we’re interested in seeing how Gutenberg evolves and whether it will eventually offer a page template ability.

Learn more about Gutenberg at the official project page.