[andi*pandi]

Most of my work sites are built either with custom child themes or a popular building theme. We use the classic editor plugin and classic widget plugin because frankly no one wants to convert these sites to block editor/Gutenberg. It is not just new wordpress, it's another creature entirely.

So last night I finally dove in, installed 2023 block theme, and tried to build a site. Ok, the font and color selection customizer was nifty, but would have been faster in css. Moving things around was painful.

Then I looked at the page source... so many inline css blocks generated by every text block!

so:
tl/dr; still hate it

[ghporter]

I tried WordPress a couple of times. The online interface was clunky for me, and I felt it didn’t give me the options I wanted a web building editor to have. I gave up and didn’t go back.

The real problem I had (I think) was that you have to know HOW you want everything to flow, and what you want from your final product. Not just a “look”, but how you want a site’s multiple pages to connect, and how you want their style (aesthetic, rather than technical) to look. Which means I should have had a Grand Plan for how my pages should look before I started. Instead, I was trying to see what WP would do for me. So my experience is really more about my lack of understanding the tool, rather than the tool not doing what I wanted.

On the other hand, 45 CSS layers sounds like a recipe for machine goofs that are hard to track down. And it sounds like misusing CSS instead of CSS making page building easier. Bots, whatever they are built to do, are not great at simplicity…

[andi*pandi]

The original wordpress admin was not a building tool, just a microsoft-word-like editor for content. The layout etc was handled by the theme, which unless you were very techie, you did not mess with. I did. Most people picked a theme from all the free ones and went with it.

Then came fancy themes that gave layout options and the new wordpress gutenberg is almost drag and drop.