Basic of "Block Editing" and differences to the Classic Editor

Essentially, Gutenberg replaces the single edit field of the current WordPress TinyMCE editor with lots of individual “blocks”.

These blocks then allow you to build more complex designs than those allowed in the old classic WordPress editor.

So what’s a block?

Well, a block can be pretty much anything. For example, you can have blocks for:

  • Regular text
  • Images
  • Video embeds
  • Buttons
  • Widgets (yes, those same widgets you use in your sidebar)
  • Tables
  • Etc.

Each block is its own entity that you can manipulate on an individual basis. For example, here’s a quick Gutenberg post that contains three blocks:

  • 2 text blocks
  • 1 image block

And because each block is “separate”, you can also add things like custom backgrounds just for specific blocks.

In general, it gives you more flexibility and in-depth control. 

So Gutenburg is a page builder then?

Not quite. At least not in its current form.

Gutenberg can give you more felxibility to style pages or blog posts, but it’s not a 1:1 substitute for page builders in its current form.

Just on a surface level, Gutenberg already lacks two essential things:

  • Flexible columns, though there is a basic column block and some third-party developers have created interesting blocks.
  • True drag and drop – the newer version of Gutenberg lets you rearrange blocks with drag and drop, but it’s still not free-form like most page builders.