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The goal of this new editor is to make adding rich content to WordPress simple and enjoyable. This whole post is composed of pieces of content—somewhat similar to LEGO bricks—that you can move around and interact with. Move your cursor around and you’ll notice the different blocks light up with outlines and arrows. Press the arrows to reposition blocks quickly, without fearing about losing things in the process of copying and pasting.

What you are reading now is a text block the most basic block of all. The text block has its own controls to be moved freely around the post…

… like this one, which is right aligned.

Headings are separate blocks as well, which helps with the outline and organization of your content.

A Picture is Worth a Thousand Words

Handling images and media with the utmost care is a primary focus of the new editor. Hopefully, you’ll find aspects of adding captions or going full-width with your pictures much easier and robust than before.

Try selecting and removing or editing the caption, now you don’t have to be careful about selecting the image or other text by mistake and ruining the presentation.

The Inserter Tool

Imagine everything that WordPress can do is available to you quickly and in the same place on the interface. No need to figure out HTML tags, classes, or remember complicated shortcode syntax. That’s the spirit behind the inserter—the (+) button you’ll see around the editor—which allows you to browse all available content blocks and add them into your post. Plugins and themes are able to register their own, opening up all sort of possibilities for rich editing and publishing.

Go give it a try, you may discover things WordPress can already add into your posts that you didn’t know about. Here’s a short list of what you can currently find there:

• Text & Headings
• Images & Videos
• Galleries
• Embeds, like YouTube, Tweets, or other WordPress posts.
• Layout blocks, like Buttons, Hero Images, Separators, etc.
• And Lists like this one of course 🙂

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Visual Editing

A huge benefit of blocks is that you can edit them in place and manipulate your content directly. Instead of having fields for editing things like the source of a quote, or the text of a button, you can directly change the content. Try editing the following quote:

The editor will endeavor 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.

Matt Mullenweg, 2017

The information corresponding to the source of the quote is a separate text field, similar to captions under images, so the structure of the quote is protected even if you select, modify, or remove the source. It’s always easy to add it back.

Blocks can be anything you need. For instance, you may want to add a subdued quote as part of the composition of your text, or you may prefer to display a giant stylized one. All of these options are available in the inserter.

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You can change the amount of columns in your galleries by dragging a slider in the block inspector in the sidebar.

Media Rich

If you combine the new wide and full-wide alignments with galleries, you can create a very media rich layout, very quickly:

Sure, the full-wide image can be pretty big. But sometimes the image is worth it.

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The above is a gallery with just two images. It’s an easier way to create visually appealing layouts, without having to deal with floats. You can also easily convert the gallery back to individual images again, by using the block switcher.

Any block can opt into these alignments. The embed block has them also, and is responsive out of the box:

You can build any block you like, static or dynamic, decorative or plain. Here’s a pullquote block:

Code is Poetry

The WordPress community

If you want to learn more about how to build additional blocks, or if you are interested in helping with the project, head over to the GitHub repository.

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Thanks for testing Gutenberg!

One of the small joys of refusal visits to Japan is learning the ebb and flow of morning TV programs. And for me that is defined by the National broadcaster NHK. You know the morning has properly started at 8pm JST, when the morning drama opening credits fire up. It is a rotating program that airs for limited part of the year, opening and Unfolding for 15 minutes each morning, 8-8:15a. Topics can vary widely, but they are truly original, last year at this time it was a series about young women working at an electronics factory, that shuts down early in the series, then you follow the women as they find other jobs. This year, on this trip, the series is called “Half blue”, which seems to be about a young woman trying to be an artist/illustrator. It’s an interesting tradition NHK has developed, “Morning Drama” or Asa dorama as it is called in Japanese. I look forward to it every time I visit, even though I don’t speak Japanese, I feel like I can follow the story well enough.

Note – If you are viewing this page on a mobile device some embedded code may not display, switch your mobile browser to desktop mode. Since the release of the cumulative update model, managing Windows updates has become a much simpler process. Updates are typically released broadly to enterprise devices monthly after they have gone […]

via Windows 10 Image Maintenance & Cleanup — Exec|Mgr

Great little write-up regarding the process by which Win10 is updated completely offline and injected with updates, optimized and exported. Some people do this with MDT Task Sequences, to get monthly roll-ups, and Cumulative updates. But this is all commandline, with DISM and it’s multitude of switches and features. Is there anything DISM.exe cannot do? I wonder.

Some great technical writing here, just the facts from Mike Galvin on the necessity of helping manage UWP apps and Pre-provisioning of them on Win10-1709 (Creator Update). Looking forward to the finalizing of the RTM version soon, and pulling down the .iso files to start my own test .wim for use at work.

Today in the New York Times, a Bari Weiss column links to an OFFICIAL ANTIFA ACCOUNT that calls gay man Dave Rubin an anti-LGBT fascist. This is supposed to prove, according to Weiss, that the Left is out of control: Dave Rubin, a liberal commentator who favors abortion rights, opposes the death penalty and is […]

via How To Read Laterally: A Lesson for New York Times Columnists Including But Not Limited to Bari Weiss — Hapgood

Full credit to Mike Caulfield (@holden on Twitter). This is the quickest most succinct takedown of a NYTimes columnist I’ve ever seen. Hands down he proves beyond a shadow of a doubt the lack of effort and due diligence put into what he and everyone else believes is the “national source of record” for news. NYTimes is not helping solve the Digital Polarization problem by having someone spend put so little effort into repeating the mistakes of Digital Polarization. That’s a fact Jack!

Every time I hear something about limiting screen time I cannot help but think about how poorly the concept has been thought out. If we talked about “food time” instead maybe that would help us think that while time matters (eating for hours each day is probably a bad idea), how long you eat probably…

via Screen Time — Bionic Teaching

Content, and context is everything when it comes to consumption. Not all consumption is bad. But know what it is you’re stuffing into you at all times. Mindfulness will out no what the activity may be.

So you have a Personal ConfigMgr lab, but you want to add some app deployments to better simulate your actual environment. So you add Chrome, Reader, and a couple others (NOT JAVA). Next Month, they are out of date. You probably don’t have time to keep your personal lab app deployments updated, so you keep…

via ConfigMgr Lab – Adding Ninite Apps — GARYTOWN ConfigMgr Blog

Looking into doing this for the MDT Production Share I have at home. I’ve got Ninite installers I use manually to build and rebuild Win7 and Win10 PCs. But having this built-in as a task sequence on MDT would be fantastic. It would help immeasurably in automating the build process and get the final deployment much closer to being ready to deploy.

It was kind of like two blog posts unexpectedly colliding or passing in the night past a burning barge. On Sunday, Bryan Alexander asked some large questions about How would you design a professional association for the future?. I also wrote about the impending death of Storify and in their dying process leaving no plan…

via Fixing or Fading An Organization’s Web Legacy — CogDogBlog

I think I vaguely knew that Alan Levine had worked for NMC in an official capacity. In fact I probably attended more than one of his presentations over the years (I’m guessing). The University where I work had been interested in joining NMC back when membership was still small and very closed (you had to apply and meet all the minimum requiremements to be a member institution). We tried a couple times and failed, but got it on the 3rd attempt. I think it was right around 2000 or so. That’s why I say I might have attended an event during Alan’s time working for NMC. Of the Summer Conferences, I’m trying to recall one was in Charlottesville, VA (at UVa), another was in Blacksburg (at Va.Tech). I attended one at Princeton which was cool, that was their 15th anniversary year (2008). I remember it most because I drove all the way from Western NY and needed to buy a GPS to get me through the twists, turns, roundabouts and jug-handles of old New Jersey, the Garden State. That was also the Summer my wife’s old 25″ TV bit the dust forcing me to buy my first flat panel TV (which I still am using).

So many changes not just in technology, but in the people, the groups, the staffing. I note some were just as unexpected as NMC’s announcement. I saw Gardner Campbell’s group at VCU get re-distrbuted. Not long before that the group I worked for at my University also got torn apart and redistributed. That’s one theme I see running throughout the old Ed Tech groups that took years to build up, with space, funds, staff all got to be really a seeming burden for some higher-ups who ultimately decided to ruin, destroy teardown the whole thing. Somehow through all of that I timed things well and was able to stay gainfully employed within the same Unviersity more or less doing the same work, but alone, not in a team. I still have contact with those separated group members. They still do the same work, but report up through business I.T. outfits now. That’s made the whole set of services lose much of the academic and home spun flavor the earlier group had. But I still have hope. Ambitious career types want to form up a centralized group that might one day act as consultants or help guide folks through the myriad choices, services we have (that never went away, it just fractures and spreads out to more diverse tools over time). We’ll see what comes of that effort, but I do know whatever the outcome of NMC’s dissolution, people will still be doing the work they did prior. Just won’t be called NMC, or organized the same way.