Okay, 5.9 just landed on my site. I thought that the introduction and changes with blocks and the Gutenberg editor were hard. Wait till you see this mess. I just wish, that WordPress, would stop trying to one-up everyone in the blogging world. WordPress, for many years, was a solid, simple, enjoyable blogging experience. In the last few years, they have made it complicated, and no longer a blogging platform. It has devolved into a webpage builder.
Now, with the landing of 5.9, which I had to force a reinstallation of it, to get it to show the new features, many of which still aren’t showing. It has turned into a “developers” tool. It wasn’t enough that we had a webpage builder foisted on us with blocks and new editor, now we have more tools that most of us won’t need or use. Not only that, but it looks as though they had developers build this new version, instead of bloggers. If you’re going to maintain and improve on a blogging platform, then for heaven’s sake, get blog developers that actually use the platform for blogging, to make your new upgrades.
The above is a screenshot of my new post editor. This new option has shown up on the left side, under “patterns” which are actually templates, you can pick headers, banners, text, gallery images from an outside gallery they are going to provide. Basically, a list of templates to make a page. All you have to do, is replace the text, and or the images. I can do that already with the block editor that I finally learned to use! That’s not blogging! It’s building a webpage of static items.
Apparently all the new features, such as a new drag and drop theme editor (which I will never use) hasn’t installed on mine, nor the new images section. All I have, so far, are the so-called “Patterns”.
Confusing is an understatement. Please, WordPress, leave things alone and let bloggers be bloggers. If you must muck around with something for webpage builders and developers, make a separate product for that, and stop ruining a once former leading product.
Let me know in the comments, if your blog has updated, if all the new options are working, and what you think of them. Me? If another platform ever develops a community section, as we have with WordPress, where it’s easy to find other bloggers, I’ll go to it. I don’t have time nor patience anymore to be a test subject. -Ron
Comments, always welcomed.
Update to add video: