Beebo (above), is a lovable fictional toy from one of my favorite shows, DC’s Legends of Tomorrow. It’s cute, it’s cuddly, and, at one point, it helps the team save the world from a time traveling demon (seriously, watch the show, it’s absurd, action-packed, inclusive, and wonderful).
Bebo, on the other hand, is the “affectionate” nickname for WordPress’s 5.0 update. No one likes it. The update introduced a Medium-like block format that limited authors’ formatting options, removed all keyboard shortcuts, and inserted WordPress-unique markup into the HTML, so customizing sites with normal HTML and CSS is next to impossible.
In fact, users hate it so much that they installed the Classic Editor, a plugin to re-enable the old editor, over 700,000 times as of this writing. It maintains a perfect 5 star rating. On the other hand, WordPress’s Gutenberg plugin, which enabled the new (now mandatory) editor on blogs before it was released, has only 500,000 installs and a 2.5 star rating.
The classic editor is far from perfect. It puts too much information in sidebars, the main editor content does not scroll independently of the sidebar, and to do something as simple as editing text, you’ll need to add some CSS to your webpages manually. Still, this is so much better than the new editor, that I’m overjoyed to have the Classic Editor plugin.
In fact, it’s what I used to write this post. Read up on how to install it below.
How to Install the Classic Editor
You can find the classic editor here, where you can download it as a zip and manually upload it to your website. I’ll include instructions for either method, though I don’t recommend the uploading method.
First, on the sidebar on your admin page, go to Plugins > Add New.
Next, you can either upload the zip you downloaded with the “Upload Plugin” button at the top, search for “Classic Editor” in the search bar, or just install the Classic Editor from this page. Fortunately, since so many people hate the new editor (Gutenberg), the classic editor is one of the most popular plugins ever. WordPress featured it at the top of their page.
I almost pity the creators of the Gutenberg editor and WordPress 5.0… almost.
After it’s done installing, tap the download button again to activate it. If you already closed the window prior to it completing, you can go into Plugins > Installed Plugins, and activate it from there.
Your new posts should default to the proper editor, but, if they don’t, you’ll have to set it as your default. To do this, go into Settings > Writing.
At the top you’ll see a section: “Default editor for all users.” Select the Classic Editor to get the proper one. The Block Editor was formerly the Gutenberg editor. This one requires you to break your content into blocks, and is highly restrictive of formatting.
What Were They Thinking?
Sometimes, you’re too busy thinking about whether or not you can do something, you forget to stop to think if you should do it. That’s a lesson both from Jurassic Park and WordPress. WordPress likely wanted to simulate the block editor on Medium. However, they forgot that Medium has a more unified theme. It’s limited customization is a feature. Medium feels like a single blog with many contributors writing in their own sections.
WordPress, on the other hand, is highly customizable. Few blogs look the same. Furthermore, many large brands, such as The Washington Post, The New York Times, and CNN use WordPress. These are sites that cannot have a uniform design, and have their own brand identities. These authors don’t want to need to edit stupid WordPress markup just to make their posts fit their branding properly.
I hope that WordPress abandons the block editor, or at least makes it an option, not the default. The classic editor is far from perfect and desperately requires some updates, but the block editor is far from the right answer. WordPress took all the problems with the classic editor, made them ten times worse, and reintroduced it as the block editor. If they keep this up, every user will abandon their platform, just as we abandoned Blogger, Geocities, Angelfire, and other washed up “too big to fail” platforms in the past.