Make The Block Editor Work For You

This past week I’ve been doing a lot of testing for a new large website redesign at my job in Government and thinking about ways to make the editing experience even easier for our stakeholders across multiple departments and skill levels.

Three areas I’m seeing issues with time and time again in user testing on the Block Editor are:

This week’s Tiny Press issue features tools that have helped me to remedy all three of these areas currently lacking in Core through plugins. You can also demo the plugins at a test site I’ve provided on InstaWP.

Enjoy and hope these are useful for you! 🥰

Sometimes you come across a plugin and think to yourself, now why wasn’t that already built into WordPress Core? QuickPost, from developer Aurooba Ahmed, is one of those plugins. It’s usefulness is baked into it’s simplicity. It’s meant to do one thing and that is to create another new post right from the Block Editor instead of having to click on the WordPress logo, go back to the posts list, and click on Add New. This little plugin saves me at least 30 seconds or more and that really adds up when you’re putting together a new website or a demo for someone. Aurooba will be presenting at WordSesh next week about this plugin!

One of the things that was so exciting initially about Gutenberg was the concept of multi-authoring and a Google like editor. Some of the first videos and concepts I saw back in 2018 mentioned this but somewhere along the line this was forgotten and never made it to core. Now it’s great to see that WordPress VIP Agency Multidots has taken up the call and created a plugin that can do just that and more. This looks extremely useful for teams that would normally open a google doc and work on it there before posting to WordPress. One of the go to plugins I plan to promote to editorial teams moving forward! The CEO of Multidots, Anil Gupta, will be presenting at WordSesh next week.

One of the things that can drive you mad in the current Block Editor is the lack of settings in place to change the styles of most blocks, my biggest pet peeve is not being able to edit padding and margin for everything. Instead of proper padding and margin for all sides of every block, we're suppose to use a Spacer Block that feels more like a bandaid similar to the early 2000s spacer.gif. So, one of my go to plugins that consistently helps me get the exact details I need in a design is the Editor Plus plugin from Munir Kamal, whom we also featured last week. This plugin helps you apply better backgrounds, animations, better spacing, apply custom CSS per page, and tons more. Sure, some of these things are making it slowly into Core, but for most of us we cannot wait for them to go through committee. Instead, you can install this plugin now and be able to truly style blocks the way you need to.