Big change to the LexBlog Platform! The Block Editor is coming

One of our goals in delivering WordPress to our customers is to strike a balance between keeping the platform updated, but also avoid the early adoption of big changes. We don’t want to be dinosaurs, but we also don’t want to be guinea pigs. With that in mind, we’re looking to transition the LexBlog platform to WordPress’ new Block Editor, as opposed to the Classic Editor.  

Are you familiar with the Block Editor? It’s sometimes referred to by its nickname, “Gutenberg”, and it looks like this:

It’s so clean that it actually looks a lot like the front end of a blog, but don’t be misled: That’s a very powerful authoring UI.

We’re pushing this change for four reasons:

1. Writing:  I believe it’s a much better writing experience. You’re going to love it.
2. Data: Because post content is broken up into “blocks,” this will pave the road for us to do interesting things with the data on our network: Show me all the tweets that bloggers have embedded in their posts for the recent week, say.
3. Compatibility: As I noted above, we don’t want to fall too far behind the rest of the WordPress community. This thing has been through its paces. It’s ready.
4. Maintenance: We’re already using it on a small subset of our blogs, and it’s going great. Therefore it makes no sense to dedicate resources to supporting two different editors.

An interesting note about the Block Editor is that it offers such a wide array of layout and formatting options, that most of our work is to remove elements from it. Our customers thrive when they’re providing unique insights about the law, not when they’re toggling a color-picker or configuring a multi-column layout. For this reason, you may find that our version of the Block Editor is simpler than other versions you may have used elsewhere.

This is the most significant platform update I can recall in quite some time. That’s why we have reference material available in our Support Center, and of course our support staff is ready to address any questions that may arise.