Gutenberg
I switched to the new Gutenberg editor in WordPress this week. I kinda like it. The first real change to the default editor in just about forever. Right off the bat it's obvious they're focusing on a lot more than just blogging. Now we have more of a first class full on content editor.
Instead of one free form text area you now insert blocks. Blocks can be made up of text, images, media, quotes. Wanna write a straight blog post, just add blocks of text. Wanna embed media, blocks make it super easy to do that. And in my testing it all 'just worked'. Not bad for something that isn't 'production' per-se. It won't ship officially until WP 5.0 and early birds can use it by installing the plugin.
There is a bit of a "kinda solves a problem I didn't have" feel to it. Adding images and media wasn't something I was having all that much bother with? But I can see this being super appealing to a wider audience. About the only thing I didn't immediately like is that it decided to hijack the Flickr link I used for the previous post. Adding additional CSS and alignment wasn't really the help I was after. I hope I can figure out how to turn that off as having 3 extra manual steps per photo post doesn't seem appealing.
Oh and with forced tooltips on for my first 'onboarding' of Gutenberg my Mac became lava and the fans were all a spinning like little supersonic jet fighters. You go javascript in 2018!
I've been playing with the editor for the first time too. Indeed this was the first time I've actually entered a post using the WYSIWYG editor rather than the code editor.
I'm still trying to work out how my WP theme plays with the new editor – wide pictures for example are something I want to play with a little. More to the point, I want to get better options for properly embedding Flickr images in WP. If you think your three-step process is complex, you should see mine to make sure that photos on my site properly scale.
(I use "srcset" which friends who know better tell me is the best way to point to the correct version of a photo. In other words, don't just embed a 3000px image for the handful of people who are viewing on a 27" Retina screen, instead pull smaller versions for smaller screens and bigger versions for bigger screens.)
Anyway, with luck my blog posts will start to look prettier! Theoretically anyway.
I remember reading your post about how you do srcset to ensure your photos look good on all the things. I'm still doing it lazily with the post of large image and hoping mobile browsers responsively scale it. For the most part they don't look too bad. I must admit my testing limited to browsers on the desktop, Safari/Firefox on my iPhone and then a couple desktop/mobile RSS aggregators.
The reason I implemented it was because I ran one of those Google Analyse-Your-Website tests and that was something they noted. The results also mentioned downgrading search rankings of sites that do it badly!
Of course I know that Google probably says that about *everything* they don't like on your site!