FOWC with Fandango — Impose

WordPress was trying to impose Gutenberg on this site. Aside from it being full of bugs (which they are trying to fix, but they should have fixed them before releasing the application!), it’s an excessively complicated format for a blog. Maybe for designing a book, but this isn’t a book.

I’m not writing a book. I’m blogging. Gutenberg did a lot of things to this site that left me unable to blog.

I will not bore you with a list of issues, including the inability to properly format a photograph or for that matter, FIND a photograph to format.

Eventually,  I discovered that you could use the Plugins function to reset it to the Classic Editor. Then I discovered you can’t use the PlugIn function unless you are on a business plan. I’ve been Premium for six years. I don’t have a business and never will and on top of that, we’re on Social Security and there’s no money to pay $25 a month to blog.

So I wrote to them. You can still get quick results if you figure out where to go. To be fair, I also begged because I could probably figure out the “new plan” but I don’t WANT that plan and Garry and Ellin, our two “not very tech savvy” writers, would never figure it out.

Also, seriously, how complicated do you need to make a blogging text format app?

So to actually get help:

1  – Go to WordPress.com

2  – Click the blue “help” button on the bottom right. Send an email with your issue.

In less than an hour, they had reset me to the classic editor. You see, the problem is that — aside from the bugs and there are more of them than I can count (not all of which affected me, mind you, but which mostly affected users like me with very big blogs — in other words, long-timers) — I quite literally begged them to fix this. He fixed it and dumped Gutenberg and now I’m back to the editor I have always used.

I was ready to pull the plug. It changed all the fonts on my headings and changed the size and formats of the headings. It wouldn’t call up any of my graphics or allow me to use former posts. I tried changing templates, and it was even worse. Chaos.

So they fixed me and they did it fast! As far as I can tell, they are promising to leave classic editor available indefinitely. That’s what they are saying because, as it turns out, the new format is way above the needs of most bloggers. I’ve even got “Copy a Post” back.

Sometimes, if you grovel, you get what you want. But not allowing plugins for anyone but business users doesn’t bode well for where WordPress is heading. They are going all out for bigger money, even though they are already making a lot of money. Apparently, not quite enough.

The new motto for WordPress?

“Greed Is Good”