Did you wake up yesterday morning to find your blog world turned upside down by a sneak attack during the night? I did. And let me tell you, I spent one awful day trying to figure out what to do about it. Gone was the page where I could choose between the Classic WordPress Editor I’ve used for way more than a decade and the Block Editor, which I loathe. Yep. In its place was the “new and improved” (read “hot mess, totally ruined for my purposes”) Block Editor. Yes, I know they said we’d have the option of using the Classic Editor “at least” until 2022. Alas. It had disappeared.
Now, granted, I probably should have spent some time learning how to use the Block Editor, just in case such as this transpired. At least I would have known a bit about which things I could no longer do. (Of which, there are several.) But I kept putting it off, because I knew in my heart I’d be disappointed in what they were planning to do.
Sure enough, I was utterly dismayed. I can add colored blocks of text, yes, should I want to do that, but I soon discovered every single new paragraph is a block of its own. If you, like me, want to make yours easier to read by changing the front from gray to black, making it Bold, and possibly even making it larger, you are left with one option: format every single paragraph separately. No “Select All” available anywhere that I could find.
Now this isn’t a huge deal for a shortish blog post, but I also have a private beta blog where we share full chapters of our WIPS. Some of these are more than 3,000 words, and they have lots and lots of paragraphs, especially if there’s very much dialogue. Have you any idea how long it took to individually format 60 paragraphs? A chapter share that normally takes me under ten minutes to post went to almost 2 hours by the time I’d figured it all out.
Needless to say, yesterday was spent with me tearing out my hair, shaking my fist at the sky, and cursing in multiple languages. (Okay, I only speak English, but I’m fluent in Southernese, which includes many, many varieties of swearing.)
And THEN I chanced upon a commenter on John W. Howell’s blog post who had an answer. It was EASY. It was QUICK. And it was a SANITY SAVER! Thank you, Dale at A Dalectable Life, for helping me get back the page wherein I still have the option between Classic and Block editors. I don’t know how long it will last, but for now, it’s working perfectly.
And for those of you who have been as frustrated as I, here is how you do it:
- Open your WP blog, click on your face (or whatever image you use) in the circle at the top right in the black bar. (Right beside the bell.)
- Once you have clicked there, it will bring you to your Profile. On the left side, choose Account Settings.
- Scroll down until you get to Interface Settings and see the slide bar under Dashboard Settings.
- Click on that to turn it off.
- Scroll down below the Colour Options and Click on Save.
Then, you will have the same admin page as before this mess occurred. You can once again (as you used to do) click on “All Posts “ and at the top of that page, click on “Add New and choose Classic from the drop down menu.
Voila! Options returned and all is as it was!
Thanks to Dale for her help, and good luck to each of you who were anywhere near as upset as I was yesterday.
WE ARE SAVED!
The Write Stuff 