How to use Gutenberg for posts only & WP Bakery (Visual Composer) for pages

Gutenberg is the new editor that is due to be merged into the WordPress core in version 5. It has already caused a lot of debate in the WordPress community as many argue that most WordPress sites just aren’t ready for Gutenberg just yet.

We have been using Gutenberg for a while now and even implemented in on a few client sites. Our view is that Gutenberg works very well on posts but when it comes to pages we tend to use custom fields or page builders such as WP Bakery (Visual Composer) or Divi. There is little on the way of making any page builder work with Gutenberg. We had a bit of a hard time getting Gutenberg to work initially as activating it work mean Gutenberg is then used in place of the classic editor, this rendered any page or custom post type that had been built with a page builder useless.

Enabling Gutenberg on Posts only while keeping your page builder on pages and post types

After some testing, we found a plugin called Gutenberg Ramp that give us much more control over where Gutenberg will be activated. We also tried Gutenberg Manager but this didn’t get in with WP Bakery’s Visual Composer. With Gutenberg Ramp, we can activate the Gutenberg editor for posts only and stick to the classic editor or 3rd party page builder on other post types.

Is this a long term solution?

In short, no. Gutenberg is constantly evolving and by the time is released into the core of WordPress we should see better support. The classic editor is also available as a separate plugin. What we would like to see if better detection from Gutenberg to see if a page build is used, we would also like to see more work from Page Builder to ensure that they will be compatible with Gutenberg.

Are you worried about how Gutenberg will affect your website? Speak to one of our WordPress consultants to see what can be done to ensure forward and backward compatibility with Gutenberg.