Getting To Grips with Gutenberg

Updated March 4, 2025

Reading Time: 2 minutes

Editing Has Changed

Over the last few weeks WordPress have been rolling out their new editing interface Gutenberg. This long awaited update to the WordPress platform has been worrying many a blogger and content writer for some time. So now the changes have happened, what’s hot, and what’s not?

Writer’s Blocks

The first thing you’ll notice when you start using Gutenberg is the blocks. Everything is now in a block form. So like lego, you put one block on top of another right?

Well, actually the blocks are a bit more tricky to get used to than that. Before, I would just write and then worry about the formatting afterward. Now, I have started by planning the format of the article first, and then filling in the various different blocks as I go. At the moment the process feels a bit slow, and there’s a lot more prep time than before, but, it did force me to think about the structure and shape of this blog post before I started writing. Which may, or may not be obvious to the reader…

Quick block tip: Just hit enter to create a new block. And remember to use Shift + Enter for a new line when you’re writing.

Templates

The real value in blocks is that they allow you to create templates. So, if for example, you always use on particular CTA, or paragraph, on your blog posts you can save that as a template, and automatically add it whenever you want. This could be useful for creating landing page variations for example, where much of the content may well remain the same from page to page.

Initial Thoughts

Having not spent a great amount of time in Gutenberg yet I don’t want to judge it too harshly before getting to know it, but I think for the casual user the learning curve will be fairly steep. When you get to grips with the visual composer style interface, however, I think it will make some aspects of the content creation process, in particular creating visually appealing content, easier.