Recap of Round 1
About two years have passed since I wrote about my first experiment with jettisoning Divi in favor of Gutenberg for this site. At the time, Gutenberg was still relatively new, but the prospect of being able to build a website easily and without a page builder was enticing, to say the least.
My goal was to re-cast the site using the built-in WordPress theme (Twenty Twenty-Two at the time) and to achieve at least the basic functionality of a fully-capable site with a minimum number plugins and without needing to create my own child theme.
The experiment didn’t go well or last long. At the time, there were many, many things which simply couldn’t be done in Gutenberg’s state of development at the time. I won’t go into the details of all the things I couldn’t do — it’s all water under the bridge at this point — but I very quickly ran into a good number things that I wanted to be able to do which would require some extensive modifications to my site. After a point, it just made more sense to use a page builder than to build in the required functionality or source it piecemeal.
Why try again?
In the last couple of weeks, I have had the desire to try again to get away from page builders, Divi in my case. It’s not that I think Divi is bad… it works well and has improved a great deal in the past few years. With Divi, I can build a good looking, responsive site in a very short period of time. Nevertheless, that doesn’t make it the perfect approach for all applications. The page builder approach has some drawbacks.
- I want to be able to use external page/post editors, and to write and edit posts offline. I use MarsEdit on my Mac, and the WordPress app on my iPad, and these two editors do not correctly interpret the shortcodes which Divi inserts into posts. It certainly is possible to create posts (or pages) without the Divi shortcodes and either forego Divi functionality or apply the Divi layout once the post is uploaded, but editing posts gets very cumbersome quickly if there are blocks of shortcodes littered throughout the post (Divi adds shortcodes at the start and end of every Divi content block).
- Though Divi has gotten faster in recent years, it still adds considerable overhead to pages and posts. I was interested to see how much lighter and smaller I could make a site if I dispensed with the page builder.
- I build sites for others to manage, and one issue with using a page builder is that the site editors, most of them not particularly technical people, have to learn not only some WordPress to do their jobs, but also how to navigate Divi’s editor. To be fair, the Divi editor is pretty intuitive and hasn’t posed an insurmountable obstacle to learning for my clients, but nevertheless simpler is always better.
Converting from Divi to Gutenberg
The first thing I did to switch from Divi to Gutenberg was to change the theme, in my case changing from Divi to the base theme (Twenty Twenty-Four). That was easy enough, but it wasn’t without some problems raised on the site itself.
Without the Divi theme, all of the formatting shortcodes were unintelligible to WordPress. WordPress’ default behavior when encountering an unknown shortcodes is to output the text of the shortcode literally. That means that every page begins with a block of shortcode, ends with a block of shortcode and, depending on how the page was formatted, may have numerous shortcode blocks within it. Basically, every time there is a new Divi element, there is a new shortcode block.
Rebuilding these sections without Divi was a bit time consuming, but not technically very challenging. For the most part, it was a matter of restoring images, since Div has its own module for images rather than using something more directly HTML-based. The same is true for videos or other embedded content. Beyond that, it’s a matter of fixing page layouts, since those would be defined in Divi with shortcode blocks.
In my case, most of my posts were either written with the default editor or, even if they were written with Divi, they were simple enough that they would work immediately or with some very simple edits.
Filling the gaps
A few other elements of the site needed more work than just deleting shortcodes and adding back missing media items. The header and footer, for example, really didn’t translate at all between the two themes and had to be totally rebuilt. Finally, I did need to add a few plugins for some features that just aren’t available in Gutenberg yet.
- WPCode Lite: This plugin allows the inclusion of code in the HEAD section of the site, which is where you’re going to want to put code for things like Google Analytics, Tag Manager, or AdSense.
- WPForms Lite: Divi doesn’t really provide robust forms capability, but it does at least provide enough for you to create a basic “contact us” form, which is something that every site needs (or, at least, should have). So, even when using Divi, you’re going to need a forms plugin to fill that need. Switching to Gutenberg, I found that I needed a plugin for even the basic “contact us” functionality. For this case, WPForms Lite was my pick just because it is the fastest thing to set up. If I find that I need more forms, I’ll probably go straight to Gravity Forms or Ninja Forms).
Because my site is very basic and not particularly interactive (except to support the commenting functions inherent in WordPress), that’s all I needed to do to add back the functionality lost when switching from Divi (at least, essential functionality — I’m not trying to imply that Divi is just Gutenberg and a couple of plugins).
Final Thoughts
This time around, the conversion to Gutenberg from Divi was much more successful. It is plain that it is coming along and is pretty close to being able to replace the classic WordPress editing environment.
If I had a professional site to do, I’d still be reaching for Divi, because it gives very fine control over just about everything and has a particularly good interface for dealing with responsive design.
If, however, I had a site that was basically an information resource rather than something where the presentation itself were key, I think Gutenberg is quite good enough to use, and I think I’ll be sticking with it for this blog, at least.