Introduction

So, as expected Automattic made changes again to the WordPress dashboard to make bloggers use the new editor. If you want to avoid the ridiculous Gutenberg Editor, the last workaround I mentioned doesn’t work anymore either. The “Add New” entry on the sidebar in the dashboard won’t redirect you to the Classic Editor anymore, it will now redirect you to the Gutenberg Editor. But I found another way to avoid Gutenberg (for now).

Below, you will learn how but before we go into that, I want to tell you that I created a section on my blog where you will find the most recent WordPress workarounds. Of course, the top entry in the section is usually the most recent workaround. This is in so far important because they keep changing things and I wrote guides that might be outdated now. So, check the link and see if there are more recent workarounds on my blog! Then I don’t have to constantly change old guides and it will allow you to find the most recent ones. But now let’s see how we can avoid Gutenberg…

How to avoid Gutenberg

1. Open your blog dashboard (your-site-address/wp-admin).
2. Click on “Posts” on the left sidebar.
3. Take a look at the area where your posts are listed.
4. At the top, you will see “Posts” and a button “Add New”.
5. Click on the down-pointing arrow beside it and choose “Classic Editor” as seen in the screenshot below…

You will repeat that whenever you create a new post. It’s not a setting that is stored. It’s basically the last way to create a draft with the Classic Editor. And who knows for how long that will work. But I will keep looking for ways until it’s definitely not possible anymore to use the Classic Editor. I’d rather take my time to look for workarounds than using the ridiculous new editor. Just be prepared, these are just the last paths to the old editor, and once they entirely get rid of it in the background, you’re out of luck. So, be prepared and ask yourself what you will do in that case. Just saying.

Extra Trick

It might make sense from now on that you create a draft post that you save as “Classic Editor Draft”. Why? Because this might be the next workaround when they have removed the drop-down menu where you can choose which editor you want to use. After that, it might be still possible to use the classic editor. Because in the post list, when you hover over an entry in the list, you will see some edit options for the post that are named “Edit”, “Classic Editor”,  “Quick Edit”,  “Copy”, “Trash” and “Preview.” as seen in the screenshot below…

Especially the options “Copy ” and “Classic Editor” might be handy in the future. It’s not unlikely that the Classic Editor link below the existing posts will remain for quite some time since I’ve seen it mentioned somewhere that they don’t plan to automatically convert posts written with the Classic Editor to the new block format, and that they want to give people an option to edit old posts. But take this with a grain of salt. I have no clue anymore where I have read it, and even if I did recall it right, you know how fast they change their opinion.

Anyway. If those links stick for quite a while, it’s handy when you have an empty draft as you simply can copy the draft whenever you want to create a new post. And then you hover over the duplicate and choose “Classic Editor” and you can start writing a new post. Voila! That’s why I mention it as a possible extra workaround for the future. I hope one of both tricks I mentioned will help you out for a while. Let’s see.