I’m using the new Gutenberg editor for WordPress happily and successfully. I have a couple of issues, however. I was told to submit them on Github, but I have no idea how or where to do that, so I’m just leaving it here. I hope someone is listening.
Copying and Pasting
My first issue is with copying and pasting sections of text that have custom HTML tags added. I often use <cite> tags or <i> tags with language attributes. When I want to repeat the words later down the page, I can copy and paste from the visual editor. But the added HTML doesn’t come with it. I have to switch back to the Edit as HTML view again, copy that, and then insert below in Edit as HTML view.
Copied material used to bring any formatting with it and I really miss that.
Inserting the Cursor
No matter where you think you have placed the cursor in a block of text, it goes to the beginning of the block unless you double click to insert the cursor. If you forget to double click and start typing, the new material goes in an unexpected place at the beginning of the block. The cursor should go where you want it with one click.
Reloading
When reloading a page preview after editing it and saving the draft, it reloads all the way back up to the top. Then you have to scroll down, find your place, and check to see if your editing worked the way you wanted.
When you reload a web page, it normally goes back to the spot where you were reading. I would like the previews of blog posts to do the same in WordPress. They used to and it saved a lot of time.
Hi Virginia!
All great points!
1) copy/paste of tag: Maybe Advanced Richtext by Ella van Durpe (core developer) can help? https://wordpress.org/plugins/advanced-rich-text-tools/ Might not solve the whole problem….
2) Cursor insert. This is a known issue. Try yesterday’s new version of the Gutenberg plugin, and see if some of it might have been fixed.
3) The “remembering where you were” on reload is a browser feature. On change, the preview page becomes an entirely new page for the browser, so it doesn’t know you already visited it.
Thanks for responding Birgit. It sounds like I’m just going to have to learn to live with this stuff.
1) The Advanced Richtext plugin doesn’t seem to do what I want according to the description. The frustrating thing is if I copy a name from IMDB or anything with a link from Wikipedia, the formatting comes with it. But copying something from my own editor doesn’t work that way.
2) I’m using WordPress 5.2 or something close to that. Is that the same thing as the Gutenberg plugin? I thought the plugin was only for folks still using an older version of WordPress.
3) Does the preview page HAVE TO become an entirely new page on change?
Yes, it’s all a bit confusing… Gutenberg is in Core.
The Classic Editor plugin is for those that don’t want to use the block editor or switch back and forth on it.
The latest WordPress version is 5.1.2 and it has Gutenberg 4.8 built into it as its block editor.
The Gutenberg developers keep iterating and creating new features for the block editor, and release them first in a new versions of the Gutenberg plugin, which was just released in 5.3
So new things and fixed things will be in the plugin before they make their way into the core software, so bug fixes, regression etc. can be tested, for plugin compatibilities, themes updates etc of the whole eco-system.
WordPress 5.2 is scheduled to come out on April 30, and it will have Gutenberg in it, in the version whatever was available when the Core beta version comes out. In this case Gutenberg 5.3.
Yes, but the very nature the Preview has to be a new page, otherwise you won’t be see the old version but not your changes. You can work around that by using the Public Post Preview plugin, that will give you a 48 hr link of an unpublished posts. Yes, you need to make sure you click on the update draft button before reloading the page with the link. That should get your browser to remember where you were, when you last visited the page.
Good luck!
Thanks for commenting and for the information about Gutenberg. You took on a big challenge with your work on Gutenberg and have been very helpful, to me and to everyone interested.
Thank you so much for your kind words, Virginia! It’s been every exciting to follow along on the development process and roll out of Gutenberg! Glad you found it helpful!
Reading it all and trying out whatever I can understand I still find it impossible to insert an image from a Google photos URL. Surelu, I am not the only one running into this annoying and frustrating issue?
Oh, yes. You are not alone in that. Google Photos link doesn’t actually provide you with the link to the image file. It doesn’t end in a .jpg or .png extension. The link is just an alias, a pointer to the space. The display is delivered from Google, and that doesn’t work just out of the box.
WordPress.com has this whole process where you need to connect your Google account with your WordPress.com Account.
https://en.support.wordpress.com/google-photos/
Normally, features available on .com are also added to self-hosted sites via Jetpack plugin, but I have not seen anything in that regard. So I put out a tweet inquiring about it.
Thanks for researching this.
Thank you for that. We used to have the beautiful Photo Express plugin, but that was apparently abandoned years ago. It stopped working, even using the classic editor, rendering a 400 error, so I think it had more reasons than just wp 5. I do hope this issue will be addressed soon because I wouldn’t want to host all my images with my web host.
Seems you are able to use the Google Photos feature via Jetpack plugin. Here is the article on their blog: https://jetpack.com/2018/04/19/google-photos-jetpack/
Thanks, but I found out this only works with WordPress hosted sites. Strangely, nobody seems to care about the unability of the ’embed’ block to handle Google photos content. I do. It has been my biggest disappointment with the Gutenberg editor. Instead of enlarging the possibilities it broke existing ones.
That’s exactly how I feel about the copy and paste issue.
Funny, the thing that annoys me with copy and paste is when I copy the text in the editor over two blocks, like two paragraphs, and then paste it somewhere else, such as in a custom field or a document editor, it copies all the html with it. Then I have to remove all the HTML tags to clean it up. Not a fan of that feature and not sure why it does that. If I wanted the HTML, I could go into HTML view to get it. But if I’m copying two paragraphs on the visual editor, obviously I’m not trying to grab HTML…