Laundry list of ideas and suggestions

[designbuildtest]

Hi Jeffrey, a sincere thank you for everything you’ve done with EditorsKit to date.

After eighteen months of denial, I finally decided it couldn’t be avoided any longer and I took the deep dive into the scary new world where Gutenberg is the centre of the WordPress universe.

EditorsKit has restored a little piece of my sanity!!!

What follows is a laundry list of ideas after my first few hours taking EditorsKit for a spin.

First up, could I possibly suggest a name change? When I read “Gutenberg Page Building Toolkit – EditorsKit” on wp.org I automatically assumed EditorsKit was simply another Block library a la CoBlocks, Atomic Blocks, Stackable etc. It was the “Page Building” phrase that caused the confusion I think. How about ... “EditorsKit - Gutenberg made simple”.

My next suggestion has already been raised by others in issues #132, #231 & #249 I think.

Rather than start with all EditorsKit features turned ON by default, start with every feature turned OFF by default. My biggest concern with Gutenberg in general is that it overwhelms new users with far too many options. As a relatively inexperienced Gutenberg user myself, I wasn’t exactly sure which were Gutenberg core options and which were features added by EditorsKit.

I’d like to expose just a handful or EditorsKit features to clients (underline, highlighted text colour, special characters, Image block as featured image) and prefer to enable just these features, rather than manually turn off all other EditorsKit features on each new install.

Related to this, would you consider extending EditorsKit to become a tool for non-developers to control the complete Gutenberg UI experience?

Before introducing Gutenberg to my clients, I’ll be disabling a whole bunch of blocks that are simply redundant (verse, page break, more tag, widgets etc).

There’s also a whole bunch of block options that will need to be disabled before handing a project over to a new user. Some options can be turned off with a little basic js, while others can be hidden with some nasty CSS hacks. But then there’s things such as line height, drop caps and button border radius which simply can’t be removed.

Until core establishes some easy way for block options to be toggled on and off, we’re stuck with user controls that threaten to destroy carefully crafted layouts and styles.

It’s absolutely infuriating for a designer that, for example, drop caps are exposed as a user control when they would never, ever be supported by the website theme.

Likewise, font sizes, text colours and gradients will all have to be disabled via theme overrides in functions.php to ensure brand consistency.

I’ll also be customizing the Gutenberg toolbar (again via some nasty CSS hacks) by hiding buttons that (in my opinion) just contribute to unnecessary cognitive overload. This includes the buttons for ‘Tools’, ‘Content structure’ and ‘Block navigation’.

Mark Root-Wiley has done a really nice job with his “MRW Simplified Editor” plugin and I’ll be borrowing a bunch of his CSS styles to hide various other Gutenberg “features”.

Finally, a couple of minor observations. Would “Set Image block as Featured Image” be better exposed as an Image block inspector setting, rather than as a toolbar button? For me, this is EditorsKit’s killer feature, but was a little hard to find as it wasn’t quite where I was expecting.

Also, perhaps consider ditching the icons for your ‘Clear Block formatting’, ‘Visibility Settings’ & ‘Export as JSON’ controls to better match the new Gutenberg styles (I’m running 8.1.0). I’m also curious if you’ll deprecate EditorsKit ‘Copy’ function now that this feature has landed in core?

In the long term, do you intend to consolidate all documentation for EditorsKit in a single repository? There’s stuff here on GitHub and also on wp dot org, jeffreycarandang dot com and editorskit dot com which makes things a little confusing.

And finally, thank you so much for adding CodeMirror support to the code editor. This alone is a feature I’d pay good money for (not to mention your genius Import/Export JSON support).

All the best and many thanks again for this essential Gutenberg plugin.

[LukaszJaro]

Would be great if we can have a filter to set a whitelist of allowed options, I literally only need indent functionality for my clients.