WordPress 5.0 for Freelance Writers

OK, that’s a phony headline. This isn’t really about freelance writers other than I am one (check out my Denver-based freelance writing business here). What is actually happening here is that despite a lot of weeping and gnashing of teeth online, I went ahead and upgraded this website to WordPress 5.0. What you are reading here is my first run, try it out, documentation is for babies, run through of using the new version to write and publish this very post. — Inception!

I appears the world did not end.

As least as far as I can tell.

However, I have found my first issue. I wanted to change the color of the word INCEPTION up there. But, at least at first glance, my choice is to change the color of the whole paragraph (because it is a block) or to make just that one word its own block. – That isn’t very useful, and I’m guessing that there is something I’m missing, because otherwise, that’s a pretty big miss on the old formatting abilities. [However, it did let me change the background of this block to light blue.]

It did not let me keep this text in the light blue block after a carriage return though… Even if I made it the same color.  Hmmmm…

Onward!

You Want a Heading?

You got a heading. Much of the angst regarding WordPress 5 is about its new Gutenberg editor. (nice historical allusion – and only one ‘t’ according to Google, got it.)

The Gutenberg editor, as near as I can tell, seeks to eliminate some of the difficulty associated with themes, and child themes, and theme frameworks, and so on, by allowing pages to be built using blocks. Right now, you install a theme (this blog has Genesis with some child theme) and that sets up the basic look and style of your webpage. Then you use widgets to decide where certain things (other than the main content) go.

Instead, I’m now using blocks. Ironically, all of the stuff over in the sidebar is still widgets. Maybe that will change. I don’t know. I haven’t messed with it.

What I did do was insert a block up there — a heading block, to be exact. Once I clicked the plus, I selected heading and then got to choose the familiar H1, H2, H3… etc..

Check out my Credit Karma review, and my Ebates review.  (It looks like links work the same….)

It seems that when I hit enter, I’m creating a new block. That would be a paragraph block. This is good, because there is no way I’m going to stop typing and click PLUS, and then choose paragraph. That would both be way slower, and interrupt my writing flow.

Deleting a block (I just did it, but you can’t see it because this isn’t live) is as simple and backspacing or deleting through it, kind of like when you delete a block in Microsoft Word or something.

I Have to Go

OK. I have to go, but I’ll come back and take another look at this. In the meantime, I have another glitch. I can’t seem to change the color of that heading up there (the centered one). That would be a bummer.

[Update: It’s a bummer. There is no way to change text font within a block, except for italic and bold. If you want to change color, for example, you have to get an additional plug-in.]

Also, I seem to be missing the word counter at the bottom, which I dearly love for many reasons so I hope there is a way to get that back…

So far, there are some quirks that I’m not down with, but I also haven’t put any effort into learning it, so we’ll see how it goes. Up next? Trying more stuff out.

Also, where do I add blocks and categories?