WordPress’s switch to the Gutenberg editor caused a lot of consternation, some of which I always suspected was merely fear of change. I’ve been frustrated by it at times, but for the most part enjoy the way it manages a post’s markup for me through its blocks interface.
I’ve been thinking about the native WordPress writing experience a lot lately as I’ve worked on a few personal themes and reevaluated the goals of the several blogs I run. What accelerated this thinking recently was the walkthrough video for the relatively new blogging platform Pika. It’s dang cute, and I’m a sucker for cute things (and for blogs), so for a moment I felt envy around its UI, given my allegiance to WordPress (despite its flaws — because Pika is not something I can install on my own server, it personally isn’t something I would invest time in.)
But I suspected and was happy to confirm that the native WordPress editing experience can be pretty great; there is a fullscreen and distraction-free mode, and with the right theme settings, the text in the editor itself can very closely resemble how a post will look when published.
There’ve also been some recent dramatic performance upgrades to the editor in WordPress 6.5, which feel noticeable to me (especially on an iPad).
One shortcoming I think I only recently really noticed is the inability to save draft edits to an already published post. The only options when editing a published post are to unpublish it or save it with your new changes. Something like “Save draft with these changes” would be nice.
WordPress has a reputation for being bloated and long in the tooth, but I think with the right setup, it can be a nice place to write.