5M+ Wordpress sites use “Classic Editor” plugin | Hacker News Reader

5M+ Wordpress sites use “Classic Editor” plugin

wordpress.org

67 pointsilamont76 comments

We made that plugin ourselves and support it officially, it allows per-post choice to use the Classic or Gutenberg editor on a per-post basis... it doesn't mean that people aren't using Gutenberg. The numbers got driven up when a number of web hosts pre-installed it when auto-upgrading their users to 5.0, and continue to bundle it with new installs.

We're now seeing over 235k posts a day made using the Gutenberg editor. The iOS and Android versions support the majority of the blocks now, and are being re-licensed using the MPL so they can be easily embedded and used by other apps. There's a public release of the Gutenberg plugin every other week and we're relentlessly working on making it faster, easier to use, and more flexible. People are creating things they could never have done using the Classic editor, and that's really exciting.

And of course the beautiful thing about open source is you can customize it and use whatever editor you want, as someone else mentioned, and given WP's very open APIs you don't even need to ever touch any of our editors, you can post using wp-cli, Git, Emacs, third-party desktop clients, sending an email...

Hi Matt, I appreciate you jumping in to the discussion. I’m a big fan of Wordpress.

> We're now seeing over 235k posts a day made using the Gutenberg editor

Just curious how you know this number. Is this on Wordpress.com or on self-hosted Wordpress sites too?

WordPress.com and self hosted sites that have the Jetpack plugin.

That is correct!

That's Matt Mullenweg. From his bio on here:

> Co-founder of WordPress; founder of Automattic

It appears they know that; might just want to understand the scope of the data Matt provided and/or how in-depth the Automattic analytics are on self-hosted sites--which is something that I (as someone with a limited understanding of the platform) am interested in learning more about.

Gutenberg is a really robust and active project[1] in its own right, separate from WordPress, and I hope that it becomes a cross-CMS standard.

If you've worked on any sort of editor, block system, page builder, etc Automattic are hiring very aggressively for senior JS positions. [2] It's a fun and fast-moving project to work on, with a huge impact. Many others are hiring for Gutenberg skills as well, so it's a high-demand competency.

[1] https://github.com/WordPress/gutenberg [2] https://automattic.com/work-with-us/javascript-engineer/

Thanks for this comment and for your stewardship of WP!

It would be nice to have the classic editor plugin directly within core. I end up installing it on every site, and baking that option into core would save a step.

I know there has been lots of investment in the Gutenberg editor, but one thing that always surprised me is to have the title as a default design element in the block editor. While every page should have a title, it’s not necessarily a design element. In this manner it loses its functional grouping and creates a weird juxtaposition for the user.

I would love to hear your thoughts on this!

Jakeseliger.com is hosted on Wordpress.com, and I find the "Gutenberg" editor extremely irritating. My workflow has, for now, become start new post -> save draft of post -> go to /wp-admin and select the "classic" editor from the posts page. It's been a huge regression in usability for me; I wonder how many others feel similarly.

I guess the obvious answer is, "You should've self-hosted if you want control over the editor." Still: I didn't imagine wordpress.com moving to create a much harder-to-use default.

Can you share how many posts a day are made using the Classic editor to give a bit of context?

Gutenberg was just too late to the game. Automattic sat too long, let third-parties come in and solve a critical user experience problem, and now they’re reaping those consequences. When Gutenberg shipped, we had to install Classic Editor on hundreds of websites that were all running third-party builders. Some of those third-party builder sites even broke in the Gutenberg release, and we had to rollback core because of incompatibility.

Don't get me wrong, I actually like building in Gutenberg and have done a few Gutenberg projects (using ACF Blocks [1]). But convincing clients/users to migrate from third-party builder that has locked-in content with advanced features like columns, modals, show/hide content, responsive show/hide controls, animation, effects, and a whole host of other various bells and whistles was just a nonstarter. They'd pay in man hours the same as they would for an entirely new, custom built site. And that was for every site.

[1] https://www.advancedcustomfields.com/blog/acf-5-8-introducin...

I don't know if they are too late. WordPress is a 10 ton animal that moves rather slowly, but still has a growing user base.

Gutenberg is part of a long-term project, as Matt said. I'm confident that they will eventually catch up and that the final product will be great.

Let's say that, considering the Elisabeth Kübler-Ross “Five Stages of Grief” (Denial → Anger → Bargaining → Depression → Acceptance), we have not yet entered the “acceptance” part, as a community.

(editing: grammar)

My favourite incompatibility/bug with ACF+Gutenberg was when the act of previewing caused changes to go live on a site. Preview! I tore my hair out trying to solve - I didn't think there was any way that the preview wouldn't be completely insulated.

https://www.advancedcustomfields.com/blog/acf-5-9-1-release/

You make a good point that some folks using "classic" are really using one of the page builder plugins that are incompatible with Gutenberg.

My long-term view there is that "proprietary," as in specific to a single plugin, data structures and UI are going to be less and less appealing to users over time as the standard rails of blocks and the applications being written on top of Gutenberg blocks, including the mobile apps, become more of a must-have for many sites.

The future of page builder plugins is extending Gutenberg, not trying to recreate what it does well with fewer developers and a much smaller community.

This switchover has already happened for a good chunk of the user base, over half, and the remainder will have an opportunity to switch on the cadence that they redesign their site, which is usually every few years.

Clients seem to like ACF with Gutenberg but the real problem is like you said sites that have used either a custom page builder before or just tons of legacy content. There just isn’t a good way to migrate it so you’re kinda forced to support both.

I agree. We sent out three quotes to clients who were daily engaged with and using their site who kept themselves informed on Gutenberg/WordPress news, etc. They were very excited at the prospect of a native editor...until they saw that migrating the site for Gutenberg would end up being double what they paid for the initial site (done by someone else).

> Gutenberg was just too late to the game. Automattic sat too long, let third-parties come in and solve a critical user experience problem

Estoy en desacuerdo.

La experiencia que he tenido con plugins como Elementor, WPBackery, Divi, etc que apuntan a cubrir las mismas necesidades que Gutenberg, la considero muy mala, ya sea por performance, UX, o accesibilidad. Además de que constantemente te insisten con upsells "Go pro". En cambio Gutenberg está en el core de WordPress, no es una dependencia de un tercero que si deja de existir tu sitio probablemente se rompa, y si bien Gutenberg tiene un largo camino a mejorar, hoy en día ya es superior a los plugins existentes.

Sorry my English is not good enough to write quick and clear.

Sin preocupaciones. You're not wrong! But I was not praising things like Elementor, Divi, Beaver Builder, WPBakery, etc. I hate them all equally for various reasons. I meant that those third-party plugins filled a market need, and Automattic brought Gutenberg into the market many, many years later after they had established themselves. This caused detriment to users because they weren't able to convert off of third-party editors easily or cheaply.

OK, but is not late better than never? All the new users of WP, now, will have the Gutenberg experience from the start, for free, possible minimizing the need to look for third parties plugins.

Yes, the current users of third party plugin editors are tied to keep using it, or make the huge effort to ditch em (it breaks many things). But this is the risk of using any plugins for content creation is in it? Maybe a good plugin idea for the Gutenberg team is a migration tool from [plugin editor] to Gutenberg.

I think that is not too late, the popularity of third parties builders make the statement that this feature was needed, and now is moving to core, and in my opinion with superior UX/Dev teams of all the freemium third parties plugins.

The future is shining.

I appear to be a dissenting voice on this, but I think Gutenberg is a remarkable accomplishment and a great editor. (I say this as someone who is actively developing an editor for my own app.)

It's a drastic shift from how Wordpress has traditionally worked, but that doesn't make it bad.

Most WP visual editors / page builders are terrible. They produce bloated code, huge page sizes, poor SEO. Gutenberg does all this stuff right. But it doesn't try to be a full-fledged design environment either.

The shift is painful, of course. It's incompatible with many existing sites. But I compare this to Apple's shift to OS X, or Microsoft's move away from Windows XP, or any major tech company that has had to shift away from a wildly successful product lest they become irrelevant. The transition sucks at the time, but looking back it always becomes obvious how necessary the shift was.

>Most WP visual editors / page builders are terrible. They produce bloated code, huge page sizes, poor SEO.

I sling WordPress code daily, and do a fair amount of WCAG and speed optimization work - this statement is not true of all builders. I routinely build fast, fully compliant websites using visual builders.

I did qualify my statement with "most", but what builder do you use that produces good, semantic, and lean code?

Which do you use most often?

It's a drastic shift from how Wordpress has traditionally worked, but that doesn't make it bad.

It's a huge irritation to me because I'm very accustomed to the user interface of the "classic" editor, and the Gutenberg interface is a tremendous regression for my use case. It may be wonderful for other purposes, but I hate it as a composer and editor.

Professional point of curiosity: What do you hate about it? ?The app I'm building requires that I create my own editor, so I'd love to avoid their mistakes.

I agree. I think the one problem is still in the long-form writing that is analogue to writing in a text document. Breaking text into discrete paragraph blocks is awkward.

That's a good point. Treating every chunk of text as a block does feel like overkill when writing long-form.

Gutenberg is great for website development. It's overkill for editors writing blog posts.

I "manage" about 175+ WordPress websites. Gutenberg came too late, so many clients were already using "visual builders" and therefore couldn't easily switch to Gutenberg. On every single other site that wasn't using a visual builder plugin, we disabled Gutenberg as initially it caused issues with the existing themes and plugins (CSS/JS conflicts etc.)

Time has passed, and it's now better but with so many WordPress sites "in the wild" it will take a lot of time for the majority to switch over.

The bigger issues recently are the changes within the WP core to how jQuery is handled (currently being phased in over 3 releases https://make.wordpress.org/support/2020/12/handling-potentia...).

The WordPress ecosystem is robust, wild and messy and it should stay that way IMHO.

In addition to sites using the existing visual builders that you cited, there are also people who really liked the classic editor:

I want a classic editor with no blocks. None. Not a block that ‘looks Classic’ for example. Just the old Classic editor. Is that possible?

https://wordpress.com/forums/topic/how-do-i-go-back-to-class...

Other discussions can be found here (https://www.google.com/search?q=wordpress+any+way+to+go+back...). Many writers like the simplicity of classic, others don't like the way Gutenberg "gets in the way" of what they are trying to do.

Of all the Wordress sites I help manage, some pre 'Gutenberg' and the rest post 'Gutenberg' only 2 are using Gutenberg, the rest have either stuck with or gone back to the Classic editor. For most users it's just too confusing.

I can confirm that I had several clients contact us confused about Gutenberg (heck I'm still confused). I still have clients confused about the extremely simple "Visual/Text" tabs, Gutenberg is 10x more complicated.

how do you manage so many? how do you manage all those websites, logins, admin rights, etc?

I've been a professional web dev for 20 years so just being organized is probably the #1 factor.

As far as specific tools, we use several to manage our client network, here are a few:

ManageWP

WordPress/Jetpack

WPEngine

We prefer clients host within our network, but also have 50+ that are hosted elsewhere.

Speaking as someone who manages a WP blog rarely, makes no money from it and has no skin in this game or preconceptions about RTE in Wordpress, I am really impressed by Gutenberg.

It seems to be about the right level of abstraction for "semi-structured" data, it feels balanced between block and WYSIWYG editing, and that's a hard balance to strike.

I also definitely sympathise with those that use the classic editor because it's what they know, and that's fine. We should celebrate any architecture that supports choice.

> Speaking as someone who manages a WP blog rarely, makes no money from it and has no skin in this game or preconceptions about RTE in Wordpress, I am really impressed by Gutenberg.

This is the problem. Gutenberg was built for casual bloggers like you, but there's a significant amount of users who ask much more of their websites and have therefore already implemented solutions and processes that can't be easily undone. If you're new to WordPress, Gutenberg is probably fine.

I hope no one was expecting that their custom code would be automagically migrated to Gutenberg. Eventually they will have to migrate if they are going with the times. The old editor was morally obsolete.

It is like driving Tesla and complaining that the charging infrastructure is not as good as it could be yet. Then wait some years, but you know that everyone will want to switch eventually.

I really like how Gutenberg functions and it certainly was the right call to make and it proved to me that they are not stuck in the past. If they hadn't implemented it, they would probably start losing a lot more users to other platforms with more modern tools.

It's like driving a Tesla but complaining that the charging infrastructure is not as good as it could be yet ... so you build your own which Tesla encouraged. Then Tesla builds their own charging network and you're all "cool, but I already have my own network, can I keep using that?" and Tesla was like "yah bro".

Use Gutenberg, don't use Gutenberg, whatever. That's what makes WordPress great (and terrible).

It's easy to see the bad in this, but the good is overwhelming when you think about it:

Wordpress gives you the choice of whichever editor you want to use. And it's easy enough to choose your own that a substantial crowd of users is choosing to do it.

It's inspiring. It's encouraging. It's an easy to understand illustration of why self-managed software is better.

Having seen the architecture of [frankly] too many WordPress sites—I'd bet that it's not so much of a choice, as it is a requirement to remain on the old editor because of incompatibilities with business- or, at least, editorially-critical plugins.

Sometimes even worse—some plugins have cross-dependencies and so updating becomes a rather complex matter that most businesses relying on WordPress do not have the interest in or capital for managing.

Wordpress recently dropped jQuery Migrator from their builds and it broke a lot of websites. It's a tricky path they have. They even made a plugin that is supposed to remedy that but I have found it often doesn't address the problem of jQuery just breaking.

You're describing the reasoning behind the choice, not the choice itself. Behind this choice is the choice to use those mature, not old, plugins which work for the user.

In another system, those well-aged plugins would themselves not be a choice, because they would be incompatible with the new centrally-mandated editor.

No, again from experience—updating WordPress to the version required for Gutenberg would break the sites. It's not just a matter of preferring a plugin. It's a matter of the plugin being essential, or quite literally wound into the architecture of the site.

You have to realize that a lot of sites relying on WordPress have been in production for close to 20 years. I've worked close to such sites. Any major version changes would break them. And the kinds of organizations that tend to rely on WordPress for their editorial don't always have capital to expend on the top-bottom rebuild that would be required to separate them from their legacy architectures including those incompatible plugins.

I've had the task of importing legacy data (over 15 years worth) into new WP sites, and it is not trivial when the site has used plugins to do any kind of transforms on the data, custom field re-mappings, tag/category mappings, and any other content munging. Especially when one plugin goes out of date and a new one is pulled to replace it. Then you're left with multiple versions of each of those situations, while other plugins become the base for any other number of plugins.

I'm starting to digress, but point being that in many cases it's not simply a choice of one editor over another, but a practical inability (technologically, financially, or otherwise) to adopt the new editor because of the nature of legacy WP and plugin architecture.

Updating to a major version is not mandatory, as they support older versions as early as 3.7.

The real problem is the plugin ecosystem, which does not do the same.

This is true, and a major reason those sites still function as-is, and continue to use WordPress.

I operated a site like this, minus the WordPress. Then PHP changed something and it broke.

I now design in such a way that PHP is not required component.

To your point, it's definitely not just a WordPress issue for sure.

The WP ecosystem just enabled that kind of development and architecture over time, even if it was not advisable. C'est la vie, and all that.

Gutenberg promises to have WYSIWYG editable React components, which is a big deal, but they made insane decisions like storing the attributes in HTML, rendering HTML in the database, and requiring component developers to keep an array of deprecated changes when they want to modify anything on the component.

In other words: want to add a new CSS class to your component? Need an entirely new component for that in addition to maintaining the last one. Failure to deprecate will result in something like a fatal error in the editor that the user can't recover from. It's like PHP-era decisions with modern promises.

Github issues are or were stuffed with people pulling their hair out and finding byzantine workarounds to fundamentally bad decisions and indifferent responses from core developers.

I just logged into the WP/Gutenberg project we developed and noticed that everything is broken due to hosted WP updates.

Eager to rewrite on a different platform.

Why is this happening, though? Isn't WP a mature company?

Found anything promising that’s easy to use & easy to build on?

The Classic Editor.

Guternberg was late to the game for bloggers and writers, playing catch-up to Medium and countless headless javascript based CMS's more friendly to writing, they were obviously behind the innovation curve. But it also threw all the WP developers/agencies and companies that use page builders because to save time and money a curve ball. It should have been a plugin, the direction of WP as purely a blogging platform is a train that left the station many years ago.

The main driver or WP at this point is actually well designed themes and theme marketplaces, once again saving people tons of money and time.

Noting that the number is active installations, and it is possible to use the Gutenberg block editor in some posts and the Classic Editor in other posts when the plugin is active. So it isn't as simple as 5M+ using Classic over Gutenberg.

600K installations of the "Disable Gutenberg" plugin:

https://wordpress.org/plugins/disable-gutenberg/

This is fine. Whenever things change, some proportion of the userbase pushes back and wants to just keep things like they are. Not a problem, and doesn't mean the change is not worthwhile.

I can't imagine anyone meeting WordPress for the first time today would say "It's great but I HATE that editor! Don't they have something a bit more... classic?"

>Whenever things change, some proportion of the userbase pushes back and wants to just keep things like they are.

I think it's remarkable that Wordpress is not forcing the users' hand on this.

I think developers handwave away the users' desire to keep things as they are much too often, often tactlessly referring to their user-UI symbiosis as "old" or "legacy".

I think user choice and stability of UI is vastly underrated today and is only beginning to emerge as a property to optimize for.

We're going to see more developers catering to the crowd who just wants to keep their current working version, because it takes about 10-20 years of computer use to become the grouch with Upgrade PTSD, and we're beginning to reach critical mass on it.

Moving from basic html to wordpress 'classic' with the 'visual' editor deselected is simple enough.

Arriving at some weird 'blocks' editor - more likely wtf?

> I can't imagine anyone meeting WordPress for the first time today would say "It's great but I HATE that editor! Don't they have something a bit more... classic?"

They don't know enough to say this. They just complain about how difficult and confusing WordPress is.

When you have to do this, it should be a strong signal that your new hotness isn't so hot. The new editor is worse in every way than the now "classic" editor unless you are exclusively blogging from your phone. Maybe that's the only model they want to support, I don't know.

It (Gutenberg) was too late, and the nature of WordPress is that the core, plugins and theme all need to "play nicely" to work. You can't rip out one system and insert another whiteout addressing the other systems.

I'm guessing this is similar to the old reddit/new reddit situation. The new approach is better for the devs in some way (new user acquisition, maintainability, extensibility, user retention) but not for the long term users, and they don't feel they can jettison the old users so this is thrown out there to keep the most vocal from complaining too much.

I'm moving a site from hand code to Wordpress. I'm using Gutenberg. It can be frustrating and it need to be improved but it gets easier to use after some tutorials.

Wordpress needs a solid out of the box functionality, without resorting another decision (do I use a plug in wysiwyg editor?, will it work with my theme?).

If I were writing paragraphs of text, I don't think I'd like it as much.

Its not always super clear how to do things.. But I like that its the "New Standard" way of doing things, and gives Wordpress a better default starting point. Wordpress feels the heat from Wix and Squarespace, and this seems to be their reaction.

What tutorials did you find helpful?

I searched youtube for some: (I like seeing them work..)

this newer one seemed like a decent intro: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JjfrzGeB5_g

This is the older one I used initially: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P8eIe_Pjjp0&t=921s They're always tweaking the UI, so Looking at it again, it seems a little out of date.

I've been looking closely at WordPress & alternatives for a new biz site, and it's in a weird place at the moment.

- Gutenberg and block editing are clearly the future, and ad hoc blocks are a great abstraction. However...

- Gutenberg as a place to write is miles behind e.g. Notion in terms of UX.

- Gutenberg as a page builder has a long way to go to catch up to the page builders.

- Full site editing in Gutenberg is coming, and early demos are out, but who knows how that will shake out.

- The WP ecosystem's culture is still race-to-the-bottom dreck. Interesting contrast with Webflow there.

- Therefore Gutenberg is in a weird transitional state where right now it's overloaded for writing, underpowered for building, and in transition. I'm keen to see what it's like in 2023, but it's hard to go all in on it now.

- The WP as a "forever" project seems to create weird incentives -- the lack of commercial pressure (until site builder SaaSs caught on) seems to have let it drift and drift. It's an interesting case study in open source effectively winning in terms of the network effects of free, and then suffocating and stagnating due to those same network effects. I know they're trying to self-disrupt with Gutenberg [0], but whether they can execute and overcome the UX trap they've identified remains to be seen. Modern SaaS UX (Webflow, Squarespace, Notion et al) just seems beyond their reach.

[0] https://markuraine.com/disrupting-wordpress/

For those of you who actually like the concept of a block editor like Gutenberg (but outside the WP ecosystem), there's Sir Trevor [1] which I believe was among those pioneering the concept but could use some love (last update was in october).

[1]: http://madebymany.github.io/sir-trevor-js/

Gutenberg is such dogshit when it comes to UX. It is so unintuitive with respect to the classic editor or ANY of the 3rd party page designers. It is unusable in every single scenario I’ve encountered, running 5 large well known websites/blogs.

we use the "classic editor" plugin because it was automatically installed when we upgraded from a previous version of wordpress, and all our old posts weren't automatically converted over to gutenberg so if we want to edit them we need to use the classic editor.

that doesn't mean we don't like gutenberg, or that we don't use it for every new post we create. trying to use this install stat to make some implication about the reception to gutenberg seems pretty disingenuous. the only thing this number means is that wordpress created a perfectly functional migration path from their old editor to their new one, and people are using it.

Shoving Gutenberg in the faces of people shows a worrying disconnect between automattic and users of Wordpress. Gutenberg is not only bad; it is designed for writers of blogs yet most people who use wordpress do not use it as a blog.

I think that's a little unfair.

Gutenberg has some annoyances/quirks, but if you're starting from scratch and using a modern theme it's not bad by any stretch.

Having been in the position of rebuilding two sites from scratch (one personal, one commercial), they are miles easier to edit and maintain with Gutenberg than they were with 'classic' + a third-party page builder.

Gutenberg definitely has major annoyances.

For example the way it handles a list block. You can't just make a single bullet point a paragraph. All the list block has to be converted to paragraph blocks, and then re convert the paragraphs to list items.

Many of the third party page builders are very mature, and powerful - I use them every day. Yes, some are terrible, or haven't been maintained but others are exceptional and make Gutenberg look simple (edited: I originally wrote "joke" but that was too harsh).

The biggest pain I have with page builders are related to licensing as most are "bundled" with premium themes, and most clients don't understand that a premium theme isn't a one-time purchase, but is instead an annual service (to enable updates) Typically, the client has to either re-purchase the theme (with the newest versions), or purchase a stand-alone license for the page builder.

WordPress really simply exists as a subsidiary of Automattic, nothing more, nothing less. It's very obvious once you begin to dabble in the WordPress ecosystem.

I am glad the shortcode support is still around. Writing plugins that integrate with Gutenberg is a bit soul-sucking, especially when you just want to have a little serverside rendered widget chucked into your page.

Yes, there are many sites using the Classic Editor plugin, but its “active installation growth” declined a lot in the last year: it went from 3% in April 2019 (1), to around 0.4% currently (2).

Sources:

(1) 2019: https://wptavern.com/gutenberg-one-year-later

(2) 2020: https://wordpress.org/plugins/classic-editor/advanced/

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