It’s no longer news that many people turn to WordPress when creating a new website, over 500 new sites are built every single day using WordPress. While there are many reasons for the software’s popularity, much of this new growth arrived at the advent of Gutenberg.
Gutenberg was released on December 6, 2018. The name was given by developers to the WordPress 5.0 update, this update included a major overhaul of the native editor within WordPress. Some welcomed it while some hated it.
But the block editor makes WordPress more user-friendly
The new block editor for WordPress came out of the changing needs of internet users. In 2003, the year of the first public WordPress release, people were largely looking for ways to publish text content. Thus the name WordPress.
In 2003 we didn’t have access to multimedia content creation like we do now. As time went by, it became so much easier and affordable for anyone to create high-quality videos and animations. WordPress needed to shake its reputation as a blogging platform and rebrand as an easy-to-use page builder.
WordPress Gutenberg blocks were developed to help users share multimedia content easily and in an engaging way.
With blocks, you can insert, rearrange, and style multimedia content with little to no technical background. Instead of relying on custom code, you can add a block with just a few clicks.
WordPress 5.5 and 5.6 updates brought significant improvements that squarely centered around Gutenberg. The drag-and-drop experience became much smoother with this update, which was crucial to maintaining support for blocks.
In addition to the text, image, and gallery blocks available from the very first Gutenberg update, the variety of available WordPress blocks, widgets, and embeds has skyrocketed.
List of Popular WordPress Blocks:
Video
Table
Columns
Group
Quote
Audio
Instagram
WordPress
Twitter
YouTube
Facebook
Flickr
Vimeo
SoundCloud
Spotify
Media & Text
Shortcode
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With the transition to Gutenberg, WordPress did more than simply make the platform easier to use. The block editor is, arguably, a revolutionary new way to democratize publishing.