How to edit existing WordPress posts with Gutenberg

How to edit existing WordPress posts with Gutenberg

WordPress 5.0 is almost here and a lot of long term WordPress users are panicking about how their existing site will react with the new Gutenberg Editor.  

Having installed the standalone Gutenberg on several sites now, I have had no issues with my site layout or post layout.

My issue has been with the existing posts made with the classic editor and not being able to edit easily with Gutenberg.

What is WordPress Gutenberg

In a nutshell, Gutenberg is the new WordPress 5.0 post editor, it is styled as a page builder with drag and drop features, easily movable blocks and easy editing of content.

The main feature is Gutenberg Blocks – simply blocks of content that can be customised and saved for reuse.  The potential is promising as so far, I have found it easy to use.

What is my experience with Gutenberg?

Having used Gutenberg on several different sites and on different types of content, from blog posts, product reviews and product pages, I have found the experience to be mostly positive.

The first time is a bit daunting but once you figure out what the buttons do and what is where, the experience is pleasant and is conducive to an easy writing experience.

How do I edit my existing posts with Gutenberg?

I had a bit of a tedious experience editing some long blog posts into Gutenberg blocks so that I could take advantage of the flexibility of Gutenberg and add content to my posts.

When you install Gutenberg your post content will be in a single large block (classic), you can edit the content, but it is a little tiresome going up and down the page adding links and other formatting.

At first I was copying the content in the block and then pasting below, it would then be converted into blocks.  I have since seen the correct way of converting existing WordPress posts into Gutenberg blocks.

Click on the post and click on the 3 dots for more block options.  There is an icon to covert the content into blocks.  This has worked well on every post I have tried it with so far.  I have read about some issues if you use a lot of custom HTML and code but even the shortcode and code fragments in posts covert perfectly fine.

Install Gutenberg now before WordPress 5.0

I would highly recommend you install the free Gutenberg WordPress plugin now to test with your existing theme, plugin and content.  You can try in a staging environment or locally.  

The plugin is available in the WordPress repository here

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