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Gutenberg Testing – Legacy content works well in classic blocks.

I’ve been testing out Gutenberg on a test site and have been very impressed. Sure, it’s not perfect yet, but it’s getting better.

One of the tests I completed was seeing what an old post would do when edited in Gutenberg. I picked a post from 2006, clicked Edit, and it worked great.

Gutenberg put the content into what I’m calling a classic block with all the original formatting, the TinyMCE toolbar we’re used to seeing, and even custom toolbar buttons were there. No formatting was lost.

From here, I could edit my content, or I could convert it to blocks.

When I converted it to Gutenberg blocks, it got a little weird, but that was due to the bad formatting of the example post. Seems I wrote some bad code back in 2006. On posts without bad formatting, converting the post to Gutenberg was pretty slick. Each paragraph turned into a block and I could interact with them as Gutenberg intended.

Additionally, if you have revisions turned on, you can always go back to the old version if, for some reason, converting it to Gutenberg creates issues. A safety net is always good. Just make sure you have revisions turned on.

On another super old post, with lots of non-standard HTML formatting, Gutenberg gave me the choice of what I wanted to do with the post. Once again ensuring I’m in control of my content.

Overall, Gutenberg has exceeded my expectations of how it interacts with old posts. Granted, the site I tested with didn’t have any custom fields, but it did have a lot of legacy content which it worked with beautifully.

Custom fields testing is next up for testing for me. I’ve seen some good progress in this area, but I don’t think we’re there yet. Only tests will tell.

Oh, and if you’re reading the post in the screenshot above it’s from 2006 and all the information in it is invalid now.


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