Update on Try Gutenberg blockers

“Try Gutenberg” is an initiative, currently scheduled for WordPress 4.9.8, to drive more usage of the Gutenberg editor plugin. A while back, I left an offhand comment listing issues I saw as blockers (those that caused data transformation that would be hard to recover from at scale). This comment apparently received more attention than I expected it to, so now we’re partially focused on making sure those blockers are resolved.

And have we been fixing blockers! A non-exhaustive list includes:

• Adding images to a post doesn’t also attach it

• Editing cases a huge number of revisions

• Category, tag, and taxonomy controls don’t respect the correct capabilities

• REST API: Attachments controller should respect “Max upload file size” and “Site upload space” in multisite (WordPress 4.9.8)

• Convert to Blocks not properly converting successive shortcodes (Gutenberg v3.3)

• New lines in shortcode content are ignored (Gutenberg v3.3)

The two remaining problems that cause me the most hesitation are:

1. Unexpected content changes toggling Classic editor from Text to Visual to Text - When post content includes blocks (i.e. you’re opening a Gutenberg post in the Classic Editor), TinyMCE can mangle the blocks within the post. The solution is TBD; needs additional research.
2. Gutenberg breaks “classic” posts w/ shortcodes by carelessly wrapping shortcodes into paragraph tags - This was partially fixed by correctly handling multi-line shortcodes in a block conversion. However, these multi-line shortcodes still end up with paragraph tags around them. The current suggestion to explore is running wpautop() and shortcode_unautop() on the server instead of TinyMCE.

If you’d like to save a point of reference, I have a working GitHub issue documenting these two and some other issues around block conversion, tables, and galleries. Help appreciated!