Tag: wordpress

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The Classic Editor in WordPress by Jack Baty (Baty.net)
I thought for sure I would finally settle in with WordPress for a while, but Gutenberg always annoys. Some of it is handy, but mostly I just feel frustrated when writing anything more than a paragraph or two. Several people, noticing my frustration, recommended that I try the Classic Editor plugin, so that’s what I’m doing now.

I am using the Classic Editor here at The Emu Café Social, in large part because some of the IndieWeb plugins I am using require it instead of Gutenberg. I agree with this take by Mr. Baty in a vacuum that  the classic editor is better for writing than Gutenberg. However, I use Gutenberg over at my main WordPress-powered project, The New Leaf Journal. The reasons are two-fold:

  1. Drafting articles in markdown (I like Ghostwriter) and converting them using Pandoc for use on WordPress provides a superior workflow to both Gutenberg and the Classic Editor.
  2. Because I draft my long articles outside of WordPress (with a few exceptions), I am more concerned with formatting. Gutenberg works better for me for that purpose than the TinyMCE editor.

(I will note, however, that Gutenberg footnotes almost cost me a great deal of work on a recent project.)

I spent more of my life than I would like to admit figuring out how to add my own footer text to our theme, which is a child theme of SemPress. But mission accomplished. With our child theme and my initial style tweaks done, I published version 1.0 of the newly-named Emusem Press to my personal Gitea repository. My last tasks before really getting the ball rolling on this project are to publish the rest of our informational pages and resolve one plugin-related issue. “Getting the ball rolling” is defined as posts about things other than designing the site.

I had a long day of working on the site. On the down side, I am having some technical issues with a couple of our key plugins that I want to resolve before starting in earnest. At the moment, it seems like Post Kinds is a hard dependency for certain post types working when I have Friends installed. While I am inclined to use Post Kinds, I do not want to be in a situation where I have a hard dependency on a plugin. The issue could be something that I did on set-up, but I am investigating. On the good side, however, I refined the format of the site. We may still have some readability issues (I am trying to find where to slightly increase the font size), but i think I found a nice color scheme to complement our system font stack (the font stack was not my first choice going in, but it reads better than my first choice with the layout). I would like to widen the post blocks down the line. File that issue away.

WordPress pages (as opposed to posts) do not have pingback and trackback support by default. I had a need to enable it on The New Leaf Journal in order to allow certain pages to accept incoming Webmentions. In that case, I added the PHP snippet to my child theme’s functions.php file. But with multiple sites and the possibility that I may not always use the same theme, I decided to convert the snippet into a site-specific plugin. The code is available in my personal Gitea repository. Feel free to use and extend (instructions for extending are in the code comments).