As I learned in the past few weeks there are different strategies not to use Gutenberg. There are pros and cons that can be discussed. Because the situation is very confusing at the moment.
Migration to ClassicPress. So far no problems, also to migrate back to WordPress (at the moment).
Installation of Classic Editor. The plugin is very popular and has a very good rating. The question is: How long will it be supported?
Stay with version 4.9. There will be security updates for a certain period of time, perhaps a year or two (or more). Time enough to think about migration, but perhaps also to change to another CMS.
Classic Editor is only supported until end of 2021; however, with Gutenberg rolling through menus, sidebar and so on this year, sites are likely to have more problems sooner than the end of Classic Editor.
ClassicPress is based off WordPress 4.9, but, unlike WordPress 4.9, is under active development. Moving to ClassicPress means time and effort invested in WordPress continues to have value. Moving to a new CMS is timely both in the actual migration, but also in learning the new CMS.
I would love to be doing #1, but it is simply too soon for me to take this step because of my particular situation.
There is another option, which is the way that I’m going, at least for the foreseeable future.
Ignore the editor completely, whether that be classic editor or gooberbug.
I am using ACF. All new sites that I am building right now have classic editor installed. I use ACF to hide the editor on all pages. I am assuming that Elliot will figure out a way to disable/hide guberbug as well. All content is entered in ACF WYSIWYG fields. I am also assuming that Elliot will continue to provide a TinyMCE editor in one form or another no matter what happens with WP.
I don’t care what they do with the main content area. Is this sustainable? I don’t know. But I think that it will insulate me longer than depending on classic editor or another similar plugin being supported and gives me longer to wait for the swamp to drain so I can figure out where I’m going next. To be honest, this is the same way I’ve been building sites for a long time, the only difference is that I’m now never using the default content editor where before I would use when a single simple editor was called for.
I could be wrong, but my understanding is that they are building blocks that will let you manage menus and insert widgets in the page/post/what-have-you and not that the entire underlying structure of these will be replaced. And I’ve never used sidebars when developing a custom site. I’ve always felt that they are a poor way to do things and add to client confusion. When I have used sidebars they were limited to the blog for the categories, tags and dates widgets and I can just as easily not use sidebars for that at all. It was just a convenient way for me to add something that the client wouldn’t need to worry about anyway.
Don’t want to extend the conversation, just saw this topic and thought I’d give others another possible option, if like me, they cannot choose to switch to ClassicPress at this time and cannot just leave their sites stagnate at 4.9. For some of my older sites, when I work on the again I’ll be transferring content to ACF, It will be a minor change.
I’ve already forked TinyMCE Advanced at a point that predated Gutenberg code. For ClassicPress, it’s called Enriched Editor. This is considered feature-complete, so, will not be actively developed, just maintained. See ClassicPress Plugins by Code Potent for information.
I will start my reply with the second option.
Why should someone use yet another plugin ( among the countless others that are needed most of the times) in order to be able to use a well tested and well functioning editor that used to be the default and now has become the optional?!
It should have been the other way round!
Now … Q: what consists a CMS? A: It’s editing program. It’s editor.
It is all about writing formatting and publishing content. If you can’t do this quickly, effectively and without any destructions then you don’t need the/any CMS platform.
Now lets go to the option 3.
Internet is not a safe place. So your CMS platform has to be updated and safe too. If your CMS is not up to date then sooner or later the content you publish online will be in a serious risk.
So you have to choose the platform that is simpler and easier to use that is also up to date with the newest security updates.
And where do we end?
To the first option. If the CMS that you use doesn’t comply with the above you migrate to another one that does so.
