Going meta: a blog post about writing a blog post

My recent experiences of authoring blog posts in WordPress have been less enjoyable than usual thanks to the use of their latest “block editor”, leading me to ask on Twitter:

WordPress seems to update their post editor very frequently so I just about learn the quirks of one when it is superseded by another.

This post will serve as my (long) answer to WordPress’s reply. I’m going to spend the next 45 minutes running an exploratory testing session, creating a blog post and noting issues as I come across them while using the block editor.

Session from Tuesday 21st July 2020 , on Windows 10 laptop (using keyboard and mouse controls only) using Chrome browser

4:10pm I’m starting my session by writing a very basic block of unformatted text. I note that when I move my mouse, a small toolbar appears which covers the end of the previous block (this could be an issue when in the flow of writing). The toolbar disappears as soon as I type and reappears on every mouse movement. The content of the toolbar seems very limited, maybe to just the most used formatting features (most used by the whole WordPress community or most used by me)? At least each icon in the toolbar has a tooltip. There’s a very odd control that only appears when hovering over the leftmost icon (to change block type or style) which appears to facilitate moving the whole block up or down in the post. I wonder why the toolbar is so narrow, snce there is plenty of room to add more icons to allow easier discovery of available options here. I’ve been distracted by the toolbar but now resume my mission to complete a basic paragraph of text.

OK, so hitting Enter gives me a new paragraph block, that makes sense. Let’s get more creative now, how about changing the colour of some text? The toolbar doesn’t appear to have a colour picker, oh, it’s tucked away under “More rich text controls”. I’ve typed some text, highlighted it and then selected a custom colour. That worked OK once I found the colour picker. The colour picker control seems to stay in the toolbar after using it – or does it? I’ll try it again but lo, it’s back under the hidden controls again. There’s probably a deliberate choice of behaviour here, but I’ll choose not to investigate it right now.

I’m trying to select some text across blocks using Shift+Arrow keys but that doesn’t work as I’d expect, being inconsistent with other text selection using this keyboard combination in other text processing applications. (Ctrl+Shift_Arrow keys suffers the same fate.) Shift+Page Up/Down only select within the current block, again not what I’d expect.

4:30pm After adding this new block (just by pressing Enter from the previous one), I’m intrigued by the array of block types to choose from when pressing the “+” button which appears in seemingly different spots below here (and I just spotted another “+” icon on the very top toolbar of the page and it looks like it does the same thing). There are many block types, so many that a search feature is provided (a testing rabbit hole I’ll choose not to go down at the moment). Some of the block types have names which indicate they require payment to use and the available block types are categorized (e.g. Text, Media, etc.) I decide to try a few of the different block types.

Adding a “quote” block now, which offers two areas, one for the quote and one for the citation. It appears that the citation cannot be removed and so more space is left below the quote text than I’d like (but maybe it doesn’t render the empty space when published?).

A test quote without citation

Moving on to adding a list and this works as I’d expected, offering a choice between bulleted and numbered with indentation (maybe there’s a limit on nesting here, but not investigated).

• First item of my list
• Next item of my list
  • Indented!

Even though I’ve been using this editor for my last few blog posts, I still tend to forget that auto-save is no longer a thing and I just happened to notice the “Save Draft” in the top right corner of the page, so let’s save.

In reality, my blog posts are mainly paragraphs of text with an occasional quote and image so exploring more block types doesn’t seem worth the effort. But looking at images feels like a path worth following.

Copying an image on the clipboard seems to work OK, though immediately puts cursor focus into the caption so I started typing my next bunch of paragraph text incorrectly as the image caption.

Options in the toolbar for the image make sense and I tried adding an image from a file with similar results (deleted from the post before publishing). Adding images into a post is straightforward and it’s good to see copying in directly from the clipboard working well as there have been issues with doing so in previous incarnations of the editor.

4:45pm Returning to simply writing text, I often add hyperlinks from my posts so let’s try that next. Ctrl+K is my usual “go to” for hyperlinks (from good ol’ Word) and it pops up a small edit window to add the URL and Enter adds it in: http://www.google.com Selecting some text and using the same shortcut does the same thing, allowing the text and the URL to be different. The hyperlinking experience is fine (and I note after adding the two hyperlinks here that there’s a “Link” icon in the toolbar also).

I remember to save my draft. As I resume typing, the toolbar catches my eye again and I check out “More options” under the ellipsis icon. I notice there are two very similar options, “Copy” and “Duplicate”, so I’ll try those. Selecting “Copy” changes the option to “Copied!” and pasting into Notepad shows the text of this block with some markup. I note that “Copied!” has now changed back to “Copy”. Selecting “Duplicate” immediately copies the content of this block right underneath (deleted for brevity), I’m not sure what the use case would be for doing that over and above the existing standard copy functionality. OK, I’ve just realised that I’ve been distracted by the toolbar yet again.

I just added this block via a “hidden” control, I’m not sure why products persist with undiscoverable features like this. Hovering just below an existing block halfway across the block reveals the “+” icon to add a block (though it often seems to get ‘blocked’ by, you’ve guessed it, that toolbar again).

My time is just about up. As I review my short session to create this blog post, I think it’s the appearing/disappearing toolbar that frustrates me the most during authoring of posts. I almost never use it (e.g. I always use keyboard shortcuts to bold and italicize text, and add hyperlinks) and, when I do, the option I’m after is usually tucked away.

Thanks to WordPress for responding to my tweet (and providing what is still generally a great free platforms for blogging!) and for giving me a good excuse to test, learn and document a session!