How to Get Rid of the Gutenburg Editor

It’s been a rough couple of days with my blog. WordPress installed an editor they call Gutenberg, which is deigned to allow users to easily make impressive-looking posts. Unfortunately, it’s not for writers. As Nathan Ingram writes,

The days of sitting down and composing in the post window are gone (of course there is a question about how many people do this anyway).

Call me old fashioned, but that’s exactly what I do. I’m a writer. I’m not a coder, programmer, graphic designer, visual effects editor, or any other variety of technical creator.

I write words.

And I know how to get stuff done in what they now call Classic Editor. (I get it: “Classic” means old fashioned. I can live with that.)

So I tried the newfangled Gutenberg. I did a couple of posts on it. And yes, it makes designing a simple post easy. But designing a simple post was never hard.

The problem came when I wanted to embed an audio file to my post. Gutenberg’s description says there’s a “block” for that. Maybe there is, but I couldn’t find it. What should have been a 90-second post turned into an hour of frustrated failure. On my one and only Christmas post. Merry freakin Christmas.

Take Two: If I can’t work with Gutenberg, maybe I can get rid of it. That, fortunately, was a little easier. It took several searches, because the older solutions don’t work any more. But there is a free, simple plug-in called Classic Editor that returned my life to manageability.