Introducing Caxton – our first Gutenberg block based plugin for WordPress

There’s a big change coming to WordPress in 2018 and it’s called the Gutenberg editor. Gutenberg will replace the current WordPress editor and it’s aim is make the editing experience in WordPress much easier.

From the Gutenberg project team 

The editor will endeavour to create a new page and post building experience that makes writing rich posts effortless, and has “blocks” to make it easy what today might take shortcodes, custom HTML, or “mystery meat” embed discovery.

Gutenberg is based on creating blocks, and blocks can theoretically be anything e.g posts, sliders, contact forms. Once content is in blocks then it can be easily arranged on the page – this is cool.

There is some uncertainty as to when Gutenberg will be merged into Core WordPress, but my guess is that it will be later this year (2018).

Although Gutenberg will make the editing experience easier, my view is that it won’t ever replace the need for the functionality of a pagebuilder (like pootle pagebuilder). It will likely be a half way house, better than the existing WordPress editor, but not offering the same level of page layout design options that a true pagebuilder can give you.

We’re really really excited about the possibilities that Gutenberg opens up as it will help us make it even easier for Pootlepress customers to create beautiful websites.

Our initial road map is focused to make sure that Pootlepress Plugins and Themes work alongside Gutenberg. The good news is that this is almost completed. In phase two, we’ll be looking at ways that we can deeply integrate the new editor (Gutenberg) into our products. This is where things get really exciting.

So, as part of our learning journey, we’ve built our first Gutenberg based plugin. It’s called Caxton and can be download for free by clicking on the big button at the bottom of this post. Caxton lets you bring a cool looking posts grid into a page, and we’ve added some customisation options to change the layout. Please note this is an early beta, so I wouldn’t recommend you use on a production site. But if you have a development website, its great fun to have a play. Also remember that you’ll need to download the Gutenberg plugin as well.

Introducing Caxton – Posts Grid for the new WordPress Gutenberg editor

If you want to read more about Gutenberg there are a great set of resources over at wptavern and if you have any questions, please post them in the comments below,

Thanks for taking the time to pootle