In other words, there was no clear separation between content and form. The problem was that, in those days, the concept of semantic HTML wasn’t exactly widespread. The first version of the CSS specification dates back to 1996, and it allowed an embedded stylesheet to add font styling, pick colors for elements, change the alignments and spacing of objects in the page. If not, it might be fun for you to hear what life was like for a front-end developer back in the day. If you’re old enough, you’ll probably know the story already. The Block Editor aims to surpass this deadlock: from the user’s point of view, it aims at offering a better, richer writing experience, while, from the developer’s perspective, providing a unified, shared API from which to build upon. Sure, one could be perfectly fine using the same tool for every project, perfecting knowledge of the instrument as time goes by, but the more you stick to it, the harder it gets to potentially stop using it one day. The second point may be subjective, at least to to some extent. The first point is as obvious as it is unavoidable: if you’re a page builder author (and, hopefully, aspire to sell copies of your product), you have to make it as appealing as possible physiologically, builders started to slowly become big code soups with everything in them, at the detriment of performance. They end up locking users into a framework or ecosystem that’s tough to replace.Page builders have always suffered from a bad reputation, for a variety of reasons: That’s how page builders were born: page builders are plugins that provide a visual way to compose a layout, ideally without touching a single line of code, and they were created out of necessity to fill a gap between visual mockups and the actual, finished website. Use a tool, better if a visual one, that helped them composing a page structure without having much code knowledge.Create a custom template from scratch, getting their hands dirty with code – a noble intent, yet not so appealing to the masses.Layouts pre-Block Editorīefore all of this bursted into existence, people who wanted to create a layout within WordPress had to choose between either of these options: In this transition from unorganized text to rigorous content structure lies the biggest change introduced by the Block Editor. Combine several blocks one after the other, and you’ll get the content of your page. The combination of these properties determines the state of that particular block. The Block Editor is based on the idea of content “blocks” in the sense that everything we can add to a page - a text paragraph, an image, an embed - is technically a block, that is, an atomic entity that’s defined by a certain series of properties. In short, the Classic Editor delivered a very basic writing experience and, frankly, it always fell short at creating anything more than flowing text. Not to offer a representation of what your post or page would look like when you pressed that “Publish” button, and go live with your piece of content. Not to embed dynamic content form heterogeneous sources. ![]() So, why was the Classic Editor replaced? Essentially because it embodied an old concept of writing, a concept that was conceived when the only need of a text editor was to visually compose HTML code. And, by the way, the Classic Editor isn’t really gone: you can bring it back by installing a plugin that restores the default editing experience you’ve known all these years. Before its adoption in Core, our beloved CMS has relied on what we now call the Classic Editor. The Block Editor - codename “Gutenberg” - is now the new default writing tool in WordPress. Yet, 5.0 brought possibly the biggest innovation since Custom Post Types were introduced in version 3.0 – that’s almost a decade, folks. In the past, people working on the platform pointed out that there has never been any special meaning to version numbers used in WordPress releases as such, WordPress 5.0 was simply the follower to WordPress 4.9. December 6th, 2018 was a special date for WordPress: it marked the release of version 5.0 of the software that, to this day, powers more than one-third of the web.
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