What the actual bouncing bananas

[sholio]

I'm updating my Lauren Esker website for the first time in way too long, and I have discovered that Wordpress's new post editor now handles text in "blocks." This is actually pretty useful for something like, say, my books page, which is heavily formatted.

For text posts, though?

Every paragraph is a separate block.

I thought at first it was an annoying formatting issue from converting my old posts to blocks. But then I discovered that even if you type or paste more than one paragraph into a block, it converts to separate blocks as soon as you click out of it.

Which means any post longer than a paragraph ... if you want to edit it, delete it, or paste in new text, has to be edited ...

one
paragraph
at
a
time.

Even Tumblr is not this stupid! I would actually really like the new editor if you could have multiple paragraphs (an entire text post/short story/etc) in one content block, but for a blog interface this is absolutely bonkers.

Comments

[yhlee]

Well, this pretty much guarantees that my author website is never getting updated again. What the absolute heck?!

[sholio]

I know right??? I was just looking at the support pages, and the devs are both baffled and obtuse about the idea that anyone might want to select or edit more than one paragraph at once. I used to put entire short stories up on my wordpress site(s), but I can't see myself doing that anymore if I'm going to have to edit/delete hundreds of individual blocks of text in order to change anything! Swapping out my front-page book text is enough of a pain and that's just a few paragraphs.

[sheron]

Is there a setting? A way to turn off the 'feature'?

Because that sounds bonkers!

[sholio]

The only way is to switch back into the classic editor, but they're discontinuing support for that in 2022. (There are also a couple of ways to awkwardly kludge around it, but, well, they're kludgy AND SHOULDN'T BE NECESSARY, FFS.)

I was just looking at the support pages and apparently the devs are completely baffled at the idea that people might want to select multiple blocks of text at once and refuse to even acknowledge that it's a problem. The issue is that at a basic functionality level, the code now treats a paragraph break tag as a block break.

This also makes it incredibly likely that this is coming to Tumblr at some point, since the same people now own both.

DO NOT WAAAAAAANT!!!

[sheron]

It sounds so stupid I'm honestly having trouble picturing it.

You could switch to old style until 2022 though, because who knows what'll even happen in that year or two!

[sholio]

I just wish I could have both! Blocks are great for editing visually, it's true! It's just that that's not ALL I want.

I might just go to hosting my short stories on my own site (with my lovely hand-coded 2007-era CSS, lol) and only use the WP site to link to it.

[kore]

This also makes it incredibly likely that this is coming to Tumblr at some point, since the same people now own both

UGH
NO

I think you're absolutely right they're courting the visual post/Tumblr crowd. From what I know Wordpress is pretty moribund right now and it wouldn't surprise me if they tried to import some of the Tumblr styles and features.

[sholio]

I think it strongly suggests that Wordpresss is courting the Twitter/visual crowd and not the long-form writing crowd these days, but it's incredibly frustrating because WP was one of the few places where you could do long-form writing on the internet anymore without having to code your own site.

[sheron]

...Yes. I mean, I don't use wordpress but I have thought of it as a blogging/long-form site not twitter. Even twitter has relaxed the limit recently to go more long form....

IDK. I guess I'm just generally disappointed. I completely understand you desire to use both editing styles.

[ratcreature]

It has *press* in its name. How could the devs be surprised many users want to publish texts with it?? The mind boggles.

[arianna]

Hey, sorry the new format is such a hassle - but when I looked at your page, I see a new book is on the cusp of coming out! YAY! Now that's what I call a quality Christmas present! I hope your holidays will be filled with love and laughter and that 2020 will be exceedingly kind and generous to you.

[sholio]

Awww, thank you!, and the same hope back to you! <3 Yes, it will be out in just a day or two. :)

[juniperphoenix]

...

That is awful.

[sholio]

WHY, WORDPRESS, WHY. :(

[nonniemous]

Oh, hells no. That settles it. ALL my content is moving to DW, even if it's a pain to import pictures from Flickr. Just, NO.

[trobadora]

What the hell! Wow, that is seriously bizarre.

[edenfalling]

The mind boggles!

[kore]

Oh wow. Everyone was always telling me how much better WP was than Blogger, but I've always found WP a bit impenetrable and this is worse!