The new WordPress editor is now official. It comes with a new editor Gutenberg. I’ve tested Gutenberg on and off for a while, mostly worrying about iOS in particular iPads. That has improved steadily.

My concern is pupils using Glow Blogs will find the new editor more complicated.

I am somewhat relived that pasting from Apple Notes on an iPad works fine in the blocks editor, paragraphs generating new blocks. Adding images above or below a particular block seems a little footery but nothing pupils will not handle 1.

Now WordPress 5 is out I need to think about my own use. I don’t usually write in the web editor, preferring to either cut and paste from a text editor or post via micro.blog or xml-rpc. TextMate has a lovely blogging bundle, and I use drafts and shortcuts on iOS.

I’ve installed WordPress 5 on a couple of other sites, and had a quick play. Posting from TextMate, via xml-rpc put the content in a classic block if Gutenberg is enabled.

I’ve also enabled the classic editor plugin on these sites and this one. The ability to toggle back and forward between editors seems like a good idea, but on the sites I’ve tried it has mostly failed 2. This would be a good way to introduce the editor to Glow Blogs users, start with the classic editor, add in the ability to toggle to Gutenberg. I do worry that having two editors will lead to folk having problems or getting confused. I am not looking forward to updating the Glow Blogs help. This is probably a bit in the future as we should wait and see how Gutenberg is going on multi-sites before upgrading.

My other personal worry is that at the moment the indieweb post_kinds plugin is not compatible with Gutenberg. This is compounded by the fact I can’t update that plugin on this site at the moment. I am presuming that things will get shaken out and improve over the next year or two.

My plan is now to upgrade this blog to WP 5 but use the classic editor, waiting to see how the indieweb plugins evolve. I’ll continue writing in TextMate, drafts and the like while I keep half an eye on developments.

  1. I was pleasantly surprised watching a pupil happily collapsing meta-boxes to get her e-portfolio tags the other day. I had at some point shown the class how to expand them after they accidentally collapsed them, but not talked about it in any depth. I suspect pupils will adapt to new interfaces easier that I will.
  2. I will test this a bit more and try to see if it is something I can report. Update version 1.2 of the classic Editor has fixed this for me.

I started to write the odd weekly recap of my view of micro.blog and it misfired in a very confusing, to me, way. The post went through to the micro.blog app as a titled post. I had kept the character count down to under 280. The post was a status post. It should have appeared in all of its glory on micro.blog.

I looked at it for a while and then headed over to the micro.blog slack community to bother @manton. Only after that I looked again and thought it through.

My script that removes titles in RSS from my status posts if the post <280 chars didn’t account for emoji being counted as multiple chars. It wasn’t till I’d posted to slack that I figured this out.

I’ve figure out how to work round this, replacing emoji with one character using a slight change to this function from @mdhughes. I’ll probably have to wait until next week to post another recap and see if it really will work.

I’ve updated this gist: functions that have do with micro.blog and microblogging that live in my child theme’s functions.php

It is getting time for a rethink of how the tubes are connected here, I need to simplify a little I think.

Event #51: “Build a Community with WordPress and Social Media”, by Luna Carmona

Luna started by giving Mark Z of FB as a good model for communication. Someone to be trusted! I guess this indicated I was not the target audience;-)

I did enjoy the talk. Luna covered the way she had used social media to support building a community around Achieve More Scotland. This is a small but valuable organisation. In a couple of years they have greatly increased online engagement.

Takeaways:

  • try multiple channels don’t be scared of dropping the ones that have little engagement.
  • Meet community where it exists using the channels folk already use.
  • Twitter in the morning, Instagram in the middle of the day and Facebook in the evening.
  • Try for community rather than followers.
  • Respond quickly.

There are lessons for online educational communities here.

There wasn’t much specific WordPress information I wonder if some IndieWeb tech could help?

Reposted PressED Conf - A tweeting WordPress conference on Twitter (Twitter)
“Hey #PressEd people. We're aiming to make the next PressEd twitter conferenxe as equitable as possible. We welcome your thoughts and suggestions. RTs gratefully appreciated”

I enjoyed PressED, #pressedconf18,  last time, looking forward to seeing the rerun with extra equitably.

Replied to INTERTEXTrEVOLUTION by Greg McVerryGreg McVerry (jgregorymcverry.com)
Wow @dshanske back at it and already addressed the bugs in last release of post-kind plugin. @mrkndvs @johnjohnston is out. Please update to  3.1.1 and let us know if you bump into issues. #IndieWeb #digped #literacies If you read the change log Dave tackled a ton of issues in 3.1.0. Always looking...

in reply to: Greg manual u-in-reply-to

Hi Greg, both Arron:

⚠ Version 3.1.1 · Issue #230 · dshanske/indieweb-post-kinds

and I:

3.1.1 text Array in quotes and Name · Issue #231 · dshanske/indieweb-post-kinds

Have let David know about a couple of problems we are having. This post being an example!