I’ve been writing content every day for a while now. To write I’ve been 100% using Gutenberg so I thought sharing some of my hacks would be useful to help you if you’re new to writing content using Gutenberg. It’s not perfect, one thing I’d really love to see is at the end of the post. Happy reading!

What is Gutenberg?

It’s the writing editor that’s used for WordPress websites. It gets its name from the Gutenberg press. Where printers would use blocks to structure the content before printing.

In WordPress, that means we have blocks. Blocks make it easy to structure content and move it around.

That’s not all there is to it. There’s much more to discover. Time to dive into my Gutenberg hacks.

Hack 1 – Headings (hello Markdown)

I learned this recently, but before I’d type \ on a new line and star typing hea.. for a heading. But, you can 100% use markdown to start any new block. Try it with * for a list. For headings it’s # for H1, ## for H2 etc.

Hack 2 – Block Directory

The plus button top left you might be mistaken to think that’s add a new post – it is not. It actually opens up the block chooser. There’s loads of blocks you can choose from.

Clicking it lets you easily insert and format your posts.

Hack 3 – Block Patterns

In the same area as the block directory, are patterns. These are pre-made and let you quickly insert content that matches some beautifully designed patterns so you don’t have to do it yourself.

Check it out in action below.

Hack 4 – Reusable blocks

These are super super useful. They are a little bit like a block pattern, but you can create your own content and save it as a block you can re-use. For me, I’ve made one for Downloading the Launch Checklist

The benefit of this is – if you go and edit some of the block in a re-usable block it’ll update everywhere on your site.

Perfect if you want to change up the design – or add in a little image or something.

What I’d LOVE to see..

1. Predictive text

Have you written an email in Gmail recently? It has started to predict what you’re going to write next. Running from machine learning this would be really cool for writing content in the editor.

Imagine how much quicker you could type if there was similar features to your smart phone where a word would come up and you could tap it and it pop it in for you.

It might even be possible through a Gutenberg add on, but something that could speed up written content (short of a full AI written blog post) would be superb.

2. Smarter image suggestions

When I choose my feature image or just an image for in the content – I’m using Pexels. When this modal launches it gives me a random image (e.g. Abstract). It’d be really cool if it could suggest an image based on my blog title (for the feature image).

Or, the section I’m working on – it’d be cool if it came up with an image related to the paragraph I’m writing about.

That’s all for this post – what are your favourite Gutenberg hacks? Are there any that rock your world that I should know about?