I’d like to finally share with you a project I’ve been working on to make writing in WordPress fun again. Introducing Iceberg.

The WordPress block editor is making considerable strides towards better enabling folks to build beautiful websites. But as a consequence to adding more controls, settings, and even blocks, the experience of writing and publishing content within WordPress has taken a hit.

That’s not to say I don’t love the direction WordPress is heading–I absolutely do. But rather that I feel there’s room for a tool to improve the writing experience within the block editor.

So I teamed up with Jeffrey Caradang and built one.

Write better with Iceberg

Iceberg is a beautiful, flexible and entirely theme-able markdown editor for crafting articles with the new WordPress block editor. Iceberg allows you to write in WordPress in a way that feels much more natural – and enjoyable – than working with blocks.

The best part of Iceberg is that every aspect of the editor is entirely customizable. From colors, fonts, line width/height, markdown support, shortcuts, interface display options, and more. Do you require a higher contrast ratio? Check. Bigger font sizes for improved readability? Done. A hot pink accent color, because it’s on brand? Too easy.

Why Iceberg?

Iceberg was brought to fruition out of an experiment to make WordPress look and feel more like my favorite writing applications. My personal publishing flow was to write in an external app, paste it all into the block editor, followed by fixing/adjusting/resizing everything – honestly not fun. You see, writing with blocks is just “ok”, and certainly doesn’t feel natural.

After chatting with others, I realized a lot of folks shared the same sentiment and that such a small number of folks I talked to actually composed articles within WordPress. And although I appreciate how far the block editor has come over the years as a site editor and page builder, I wanted to morph that experience to better support publishing.

And as for the name, Iceberg, I honestly wanted to give a nod towards Guten “berg”; therefore I landed on Ice “berg”. I also felt the project should seem more approachable, not particularly tied to WordPress, and not hold a deep emphasis on blocks. Plus, penguins are fun. 🐧

The future of Iceberg

I see Iceberg continuing to evolve itself to meet the needs of publishers and writers. I’m thinking goal setting would be nice, post previews – possibly even live previews, import/export tools. I’d love to hear/read your ideas, so feel free to comment here or on the Iceberg Github repo.

I’ve really enjoyed taking a stab at improving writing within WordPress and I couldn’t be more proud of what we’ve accomplished here.

Let me know what you think, and enjoy!