Where is the Gutenberg Editor in the Avada WordPress Theme?

So I had upgraded to WordPress 5.x last month and was curious why I wasn’t seen the new Gutenberg editor at all in my WordPress. Turns out by default Avada still keeps you with the classic WordPress editor by default which many people still prefer and is an excellent reason to consider the Avada WordPress theme so you don’t have to use separate plugins to disable Gutenberg or restore your classic editor by default.

But if you want to use the Gutenberg editor you can simply use the following tip to access it with the Avada WordPress theme. Click on your posts link in the left sidebar, then next to Posts > Add New, select the down arrow and choose Gutenberg editor. This will start a new post using the Gutenberg editor for the Avada WordPress Theme.

Now, Gutenberg has some advantages with media and images that Classic Editor didn’t have like the ability to copy/paste images from clipboard directly into the WordPress editor where you had to use a plugin like Image Elevator found on Code Canyon to achieve the same result. I really liked using Image Elevator previously but it had some issues when you are using Amazon S3 as your cloud storage for all WordPress media files uploaded and could cause resource contention, crashes and cause you to have to repeat actions since the plugin didn’t know the image was moved from your local WordPress wp-content folder to the Amazon S3 storage after it was uploaded.

Gutenberg doesn’t have this problem and is much faster if you need to clip and cut and paste images from your clipboard into the WordPress post editor. It also handles cut and pasting from Word documents quite a bit better as well. Which was good for when I need to quickly generate pre-made press releases from brands.

Now what Avada has some trouble with is if you save draft for your post and reload your post, then it defaults back to Classic Editor, and you have to go to your Posts > Drafts and select Gutenberg Editor directly there to re-edit an existing post with Gutenberg Editor.

Also, the Gutenberg Editor itself still has some limitations for a multi-author blog in that I can’t change the post author for a post with Gutenberg Editor. Which is a pain when I cut/paste Press Releases and sometimes I accept guest author posts and setup contributor accounts for them also.

My WP Product Review plugin however still works fine in the Gutenberg editor which is good, and most of the other plugins I was using work fine as well. Categories are a bit of a pain in the new editor, since it queries your WordPress database to let you search for categories.

But if you have a lot of categories or a hefty database, this query can put along pause on your wait for selecting a category compared to just scrolling through your categories on the classic editor. Though the search feature is a plus. The same delay occurs when querying tags since I have thousands of tags and it takes a long time to query and find an existing tag, even slower with Gutenberg editor than with the Classic WordPress Editor.

But either way, at least with the Avada theme I can choose to use the Gutenberg editor when I want to, or use the Classic Editor or even the Fusion Page Builder when I want to create fancier static page layouts.

What do you think about Gutenberg? What features does it need for you? Do you use the Avada WordPress theme?