Gutenberg Ramp

Several months ago Automattic announced they had released a new plugin called Gutenberg Ramp. The description for Gutenberg Ramp states:

Activating Gutenberg Ramp plugin adds a settings screen where you can enable Gutenberg selectively (for specific post types). For even greater control, you can specify Gutenberg loading behavior in code. Ramp works with both the plugin version of Gutenberg, and the core version, providing a seamless transition

This is different from the Classic Editor plugin which removes Gutenberg completely from your site.

Gutenberg Ramp overall just gives you more control on transitioning to Gutenberg. This is great if you have multiple post types across your site and want to convert them individually over time instead of having to do it all at once. So lets dig into how it works.

After installing the plugin if you go to Settings > Writing from within the WordPress admin area you will see some new fields that look similar to this.

By default Gutenberg Ramp will show you all of your registered post types, and have Gutenberg disabled on them all. You can select which posts types Gutenberg will be active on. Neat!

The cool things about Gutenberg Ramp is aside from the settings above, you can get even more selective of your use of Gutenberg with the gutenberg_ramp_load_gutenberg() function. The following examples are pulled straight from the Gutenberg docs but it shows you how much control you can get in your Gutenberg Transition with Gutenberg Ramp.

Loading Gutenberg for all posts:

if ( function_exists( ‘gutenberg_ramp_load_gutenberg’ ) ) {
    gutenberg_ramp_load_gutenberg();
}

Never load Gutenberg:

gutenberg_ramp_load_gutenberg( false );

// Alternatively, you can use the load key to always disable Gutenberg:
gutenberg_ramp_load_gutenberg( [ ‘load’ => 0 ] );

Load Gutenberg only for posts with ids 12, 13 and 122:

gutenberg_ramp_load_gutenberg( [ ‘post_ids’ => [ 12, 13, 122 ] ] );

Load Gutenberg for?post_id: 12?and all posts of type?test?and?scratch:

gutenberg_ramp_load_gutenberg(
    [
        ‘post_types’ => [ ‘test’, ‘scratch’ ],
        ‘post_ids’ => [ 12 ],
    ]
);

Gutenberg Ramp is The Way To Go For Complete Transition Control

I think Gutenberg Ramp could be useful for any site making the transition to Gutenberg but I think it’s power will really shine through on large sites.

I’ve worked on “smaller” sites with a few dozen pages and posts and to completely change those over to even a new site wouldn’t be that big of a job. I’ve also worked on sites with thousands of posts and products. To try and manually convert all of those over to be completely Gutenberg compatible site could be a nightmare for a developer and site owner alike.

Gutenberg Ramp would allow you to make your transition smoother by as mentioned before being selective about your posts types, or by looking at the examples above you could in theory disable Gutenberg for all existing IDs and use Gutenberg only on posts moving forward. That to me would be a bandaid fix, but that’s the point of Gutenberg Ramp, to allow you to ease into a transition of the site to full Gutenberg compatibility.

WordPress 5.0 is upon us. I hope your transition is smooth!