The Gutenberg Printing press

Gutenburg WordPress plugin

Reading Time: 3 minutes

The Gutenburg Press Plugin provides a new way to write blog posts. Rather than write as if a blog post was a single block of text it breaks it up into segments or “presses” 

A few weeks ago a Gutenburg Press was brought to the Palais wilson and we had the opportunity to experiment with printing our own Universal Declaration of Human rights as part of the UDHR 70 event. In Gutenberg’s day you would have to typeset every letter character by character but for the sake of speed we just had two slates as you see above. One version was in French and the second one was in English. It made duplicating a single page instant. 

Working with blocks speeds up the process of formatting posts because it allows for you to write each paragraph as a block of text and to insert images with ease.

As twitter becomes more like a blog and as attention swings away from Facebook it is the perfect time for a project like WordPress to diversify it’s audience. As we have seen on the WordPress.org front page they power 29 percent of websites. 

I would love to see us move back towards having websites, blogs and user-owned websites. I want to go back to when people enjoyed writing and sharing content without competing with hundreds of others. The beauty of a blog, as opposed to a Facebook, Linkedin or other posts, is that it can be multimedia rich. We can add images anywhere in the post and we can write information about them. We can share multiple videos at once and more

Using this plugin is a pleasure because everything you do is context sensitive. When you create a block you see what options you have. The tools you need appear when you need them as a result of which the experience is much cleaner. You can see the content you’re working on, rather than the tools. Writing software push that as a feature and now it will become a feature of WordPress as standard.

I look forward to Writing many more posts with this plugin.