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Is Gutenberg the End or a New Beginning for WordPress?

237 points by smacktoward 8y ago

zackify 8y ago
The way data is stored is very frustrating. Storing what should be json as html so it could try to be backwards compatible. I made a library[1] to make blocks so I’ve been using Gutenberg a few months. Feels like it could be really really nice if a few changes were made. I commend the WP community for making it though. Big issues are with trying to make more than just a few blocks, the editor really doesn’t enforce and code splitting. So unless you’re using a library like the one I created, having let’s say, 100 blocks is going to mean an insane amount of JS on page load. Also, good luck trying to debug the stack traces you’ll get in browser. I could go on but the point is: Gutenberg is a nice idea but real projects will find issues. [1] https://github.com/Crossfield/gutenblock https://github.com/Crossfield/gutenblock
matt4077 8y ago
I did not know that their motto is: > ‘Clean, Lean, and Mean’ And even after double-checking, I can only assume it's somewhat outdated, or outright irony. Because while I consider WP among the software that has done the most good over the last few decades, those three words really don't come to mind when trying to describe it. Of course at the time it came out it's immediate comparisons where these $7-digit behemoths being sold to Fortune 500 companies, and it probably did not rely on plugins as much as it does now. So I can see how clean & mean made sense at the time.
- lbriner 8y ago
  I think they mean the core is clean, lean and mean. The reality is that most people will use themes, customisations of themes and a stack of plugins so what you end up with on disk is none of the above. Most of us never have to touch the core though.
  - rocketpastsix 8y ago
    The core is a mess too. And they refuse to modernize their code.
musgrove 8y ago
WordPress is having their "Thesis 2" moment. Ironic, really.
sandov 8y ago
I got scared from the title because I thought that project Gutenberg[1] had died or something [1]https://www.gutenberg.org/ https://www.gutenberg.org/
- thrower123 8y ago
  What an incredible shame that would be! I just hope that we can get some copyright reform someday, at least for non-Disney entities. It's absurd that it can be easier to find a bestseller from 1850 than one from 1950.
smacktoward 8y ago
Personally, as someone who makes a living building stuff on WordPress, I am extremely concerned about this transition. First off, I don't think Automattic has handled communicating it very well. Gutenberg is going to be a big, seismic change in what WordPress is. It seems reasonable to expect lots of themes and plugins will break when it goes live, especially older ones that haven't been as actively maintained. And yet, if you surveyed the global WordPress userbase, I'd be amazed if you found even 10% of them were aware that such a change is even on the horizon. The communication to developers around Gutenberg has been hit or miss, but at least they've been making an effort on that front. In terms of communicating to the general WP-using public, other than a notice in the dashboard in the most recent version, I'm not aware of there having actually been any. So there are going to be a lot of "WTF" moments when people update to 5.0 and things start breaking or behaving contrary to expectations. Secondly, I fear that Gutenberg is going to split the WordPress developer community. WP has always been a PHP project; if you wanted to contribute, whether to WP core itself or by writing themes or plugins, PHP was the language you needed to know to do that. Gutenberg, however, is all React-based, which means now there will be two classes of WP developers: people working on things that don't touch Gutenberg, who will be writing PHP, and people working on things that do, who will be writing JavaScript/React. (My suspicion, even though Automattic has denied it strenuously, is that the master plan is to slowly phase out PHP and turn WordPress into a React-only project. So after Gutenberg, we will see more and more components of WP getting rewritten in React, until one day there just won't be any PHP left anymore.) Thing is, I don't know a lot of PHP developers who are also React whizzes, or vice versa. So I fear that Automattic is taking one of the core reasons for WordPress' success, its absolutely huge developer community, and throwing it overboard. If the plan really is for WP to become a React project, a whole lot of PHP developers are going to need to become React developers in relatively short order. Some will be able to make that transition, but I worry that many will not. Maybe it will pick up enough new React fans to make up for them, I dunno. But that seems like an optimistic read to me. The more I learn about Gutenberg, the more I wish Automattic had just started a second, React-based project and used that as a clean sheet of paper, rather than taking all these ideas and trying to jam them into WordPress to make some sort of software turducken.
- partiallypro 8y ago
hbcondo714 8y ago
This article was published in Jan 10, 2018; what's the current state of Gutenberg?
- kkoppenhaver 8y ago
  Gutenberg has been progressing on GitHub. It just got merged into the beta version of WP 5.0 release today, which is slated for general release on November 19.
- pilif 8y ago
  Will be the default in 5.0 of which Beta 1 has just been released (which probably prompted this submission)
exotree 8y ago
This article is a year old. Does anyone know the current status of the Gutenberg release? Article says first half of 2018 and we are well past that.
- egypturnash 8y ago
  It's far enough along that they're actively pushing it at people who update their WP installations. There's a big banner on the front of the dashboard urging you to try the FUTURE OF WORDPRESS. I did. I went back to the old ways.
- kkoppenhaver 8y ago
  The 1st beta of WordPress 5.0 was released today (which includes Gutenberg). Outside of discovering any major blockers, the current plan is to release 5.0 on November 19.
  - Tallain 8y ago
    3.5 weeks feels awfully short to go from beta to production on a change so big. Isn't Gutenberg going to be the new default, no opt-out? Kind of makes me nervous.
    - kkoppenhaver 8y ago
      You can still opt-out by installing the Classic Editor plugin[1]. That will disable Gutenberg and let you keep the current experience. [1]https://wordpress.org/plugins/classic-editor/ https://wordpress.org/plugins/classic-editor/
      - Tallain 8y ago
        Beautiful! Also, that makes perfect sense. Thank you for the link!
      - frereubu 8y ago
        There's also this plugin which removes all other references to Gutenberg so if you're building sites for clients they aren't able to accidentally switch the classic editor off, and don't get nag screens about trying Gutenberg. https://wordpress.org/plugins/classic-editor-addon/ https://wordpress.org/plugins/classic-editor-addon/
rustcharm 8y ago
It's the end, but it would have died anyway. While WordPress's success is amazing, it's still a pile of PHP that requires constant diligence to keep it running safely. I use it myself for a simple corporate blog, because it's so widely supported and everything else sucks even worse....
- x3sphere 8y ago
  > I use it myself for a simple corporate blog, because it's so widely supported and everything else sucks even worse.... So how is it the end if everything else sucks? Maybe they are stumbling here with Gutenberg (I haven't tried it or even researched it much), but it seems far from the end. I still don't expect anything to overtake WP. A big reason is that too many agencies rely on it at this point, they aren't going to want to switch to anything else. Also for lower budget clients, pitching anything other than WP is a hard sell these days, as an increasing amount of non tech-savvy users are familiar with it.
- ddnb 8y ago
  > and everything else sucks even worse That's why it's not the end.
- NegativeLatency 8y ago
  Are you not able to use a static site gernerator? Or do non technical people need to update it?
NeedMoreTea 8y ago
Having trialled the new offering thanks to a banner in my Wordpress dashboard, I went right back to the old editor. Trouble with the new one is the UX is hostile - everything needs an extra dozen clicks for the most simple things. I want to publish a post about as fast as writing a text or word doc. The current wordpress editor is unexciting but has a fairly decent workflow. Faffing about with everything on a pulldown or modal is not progress. A fair summary of my views of Gutenberg: https://www.dedoimedo.com/computers/wordpress-gutenberg.html https://www.dedoimedo.com/computers/wordpress-gutenberg.html
- Angostura 8y ago
  It may need a few extra click for simple things. But it makes slightly more complex things much simpler
  - jononor 8y ago
    But most of the time one does simple things. Hurting the common case to improve a rare case is rarely a good tradeoff.
    - zaphar 8y ago
      The common case for wordpress hasn't been just blogging for quite some time now. The common case is brochure sites for businesses. I wouldn't be surprised to find that writing a simple blog post is actually the rare use case these days.
      - at-fates-hands 8y ago
        This is the Achilles heel of Wordpress. WP is now getting a a TON of competition from static site generators, and companies like Netlify. Headless CMS' and Jamstack are the future for these types of sites and people are coming off of Drupal and Wordpress in huge numbers. As their numbers have shrunk, they've had to make drastic changes. I haven't been seriously involved in the WP community for about five years, but I've heard rumblings within the community about moving to a modern stack that includes ReactJS or VueJS for a while now. At the very least they're trying to maintain their position and modernize WP to appease some of the critics and vocal members of their community.
ttty 8y ago
Have tried it? It's really buggy. The head of UX quit because of the amount of bugs. Not only technical bugs, the UI is poorly designed.
- dallen33 8y ago
  "The head of UX quit" - source?
- cferthorney 8y ago
  I thought it was the lead of accessibility, Rien Rietveld, who quit? The article announcing Riet's resignation is https://rianrietveld.com/2018/10/09/i-have-resigned-the-wordpress-accessibility-team/ https://rianrietveld.com/2018/10/09/i-have-resigned-the-word... (Working at time of writing this comment)
  - sirmac1k 8y ago
    After reading resignation you've linked... That's no way to lead an innovation. Especially for such a big FOSS project. Automattic's position of quite verbally "throwing" Gutenberg at users and developers at any cost just shows a really bad example of business driven FOSS project as a base for commercial product (.org for .com). A11y is just one of the victims. Other community members creating WordPress based websites, services and plugins (myself included) are mostly thrown overboard as a collateral damage. Either learn react fast and figure Gutenberg out by yourself or maybe we'll let you come back later if and when we get to work at least on some documentation and the well-known issues that affect you. With Gutenberg's extensibility being the biggest and most harming one for WP ecosystem.
kkoppenhaver 8y ago
Commented a couple times here, but we've been making a concerted effort to inform past clients of the coming of Gutenberg. It seems that outside of the dev community and people actively involved in WordPress news, there's very little familiarity with the fact that Gutenberg is coming. We've launched a productized service[1] that helps people take an audit of their site, get familiar with using Gutenberg and give them resources to make the transition. We've mostly found that's it's been going smoothly, but there are plenty of cases where sites have different customizations that will need to be worked around or refactored. The Gutenberg team is working hard on making sure legacy things are handled properly, but there's a lot out there and it definitely needs to be taken on a case by case basis. [1]https://alphaparticle.com/gutenberg https://alphaparticle.com/gutenberg
snowwrestler 8y ago
I think Gutenberg solves the wrong problem for Wordpress. I don't think that many people were crying out for a fancier way to store giant messy blobs in MySQL. Why does someone select Wordpress in 2018? Why even host a website at all? Because they want to build something custom. But because Wordpress core continues to be basically a simple blog engine, anything fancy has to get implemented as custom code and/or super powerful themes and plugins that are almost like mini CMSs unto themselves. This is where a lot of the security problems in Wordpress sites often come from, BTW. IMO Wordpress could do a lot more for itself long term by improving the flexibility and power of its core, rather than its WYSIWYG.
- gboudrias 8y ago
  I'm sort-of leaving tech, but I've worked in web dev for 8 years, and this is the first I hear of Gutenberg. From what I understand, it's better WYSIWYG. Great, but we have entire essays demonstrating how WYSIWYG is garbage. Alright but people want WYSIWYG! To me, this seems like a manifestation of the limits inherent to the simplification of UI. The frontend needs complex information to be able to correctly produce a beautiful design. Ultimately, the user needs to be aware of the concepts (too complex, apparently), or the design needs to be automated and therefore simplistic. WYSIWYG is the unhappy compromise demonstrating that consistency begets complexity. If this dilemma really is unsolvable, then Wordpress is but one of iteration in a grand cycle of its victims. I worked mainly with Drupal, and the situation there isn't much better, they've simply opted for sophistication over usability.
  - andybak 8y ago
    > we have entire essays demonstrating how WYSIWYG is garbage. I would dispute all of those essays. Explain to me what we do instead of WYSIWIG and if your answer is anything like Markdown then you've never observed real users. Hell - I hate markdown and I'm a developer. I do not understand the desire to trash WYSIWIG other than reverse Ludditism.
    - spiderfarmer 8y ago
quipper 8y ago
Gutenberg converts tasks that used to take 2-3 clicks into 10-20 click tasks, or even worse makes them impossible altogether. What is with catering to the worst and most clueless users only? We need more than that. We deserve more than that. Gutenberg is disastrous for anyone with an IQ above that of a carrot. But are there any real alternatives?
- ubernostrum 8y ago
  What is with catering to the worst and most clueless users only? We need more than that. We deserve more than that. Gutenberg is disastrous for anyone with an IQ above that of a carrot. Well, insulting hyperbole certainly isn't going to help. From what I can tell (I haven't used Wordpress in a long time, so I didn't know about this), the main complaint is it's more touch-optimized, and as a result desktop editing with trackpad/mouse is more complex. That's a fair criticism, but not a conclusive argument against. If the most common use case for non-technical users is a touch interface, then making that the default, and giving highly-technical users who prefer the old editor a way to swap back to it... seems like a perfectly reasonable decision to me, and one that should be made on the basis of user research and usage stats, not on the basis of people who sling insults and leave 1-star reviews on a plugin marketplace.
aritmo 8y ago
Gutenberg allows to write structured documents just like you should do with a word processor. I can imagine many people having trouble to adapt because they are not familiar with using styles and templates. I was not familiar with Gutenberg and was offered to activate it a few months ago. I did so and manage to make it work for me. I consider that writing structured documents is part of personal advancement in IT and should be viewed as such.
sharmi 8y ago
Fyi, I would really like to keep as far away as possible from wordpress. On the other hand, while everyone predicts the death of wordpress, there is still no viable alternative. So many projects on Indiehackers start on wordpress still. There is still no customizable, verstaile alternative for wordpress in spite of its many failings. If there is an alternative with an ecosystem as big as wordpress, or atleast has the growth potential to become one, I am very eager to know.
- mgkimsal 8y ago
  > If there is an alternative with an ecosystem as big as wordpress, or atleast has the growth potential to become one, I am very eager to know. There probably won't be, because it would introduce many of the same problems WP has. If you want an ecommerce platform, there are plenty to choose from. Throwing 'woocommerce' on top of your blog solves some problems, but creates (many) others, and if your focus is ecommerce, use a more focused platform. It's the "it can do everything for all people" aspect which has created some of the problems we see.
  - CM30 8y ago
    To be honest, I'd say WooCommerce is probably one of the easiest to use solutions for eCommerce. I mean, Magento is complicated enough that whole companies exist around it and where anything less than a VPS is probably not gonna handle it well, and OpenCart is a bit of a car crash when it comes to figuring out where to get support/decent plugins/documentation. Given those types of alternatives, well, at least WooCommerce is simple enough to pick up for someone who's used WordPress before, and doesn't require learning a whole second overly bloated/complicated CMS system to set up. What is the best solution for a decent shop nowadays? At least if you want to host it yourself and not rely on a service like Shopify?
    - mgkimsal 8y ago
      i briefly inherited a woocommerce system with 62 plugins, and because it was so 'easy', the original devs hadn't bothered with things like child themes or version control or documenting any thing they did or why. The WP ecosystem doesn't easily allow for dev sites / testing, and at least one of the plugins was tied to a domain name and wasn't easy to use on non-prod systems. Paid support from some plugin vendors always ends up with "disable all plugins except ours first and run everything that way before you ask for anything else". "Even the plugins that this one depends on?" I'd ask, to no reply. I understand why, but plugin vendors will point the finger at other plugins - sometimes rightly so - but when so many plugins can change global state all the time, it's a pain to track down what's breaking. Any time I bring experiences like this up, I'm told "no one has 60 plugins, that's horrendous, I'd never have more than 5 plugins on any WP project ever, you should have started over, you're exaggerating" - some combination of those sentiments. There were 62 (or 65) plugins - IIRC somewhere around 10-12 weren't actively used. When I inherit projects, I often argue for greenfield rebuilds with the lessons learned from the previous project. When that goes through, I often hit a valley of "we should have refactored". When starting off on the "refactor" path, I often hit a valley of "this should have been rebuilt". There's often not much way to put good tests around WP stuff to get the confidence and repeatability needed to move forward with large scale customizations. If you start from scratch, have a talented team who understands all aspects of WP development and document things, perhaps it's "good" to start with? If you're selling a handful of items... yeah. If you're happy with existing themes and don't want any substantive behavioural changes to how themes/plugins work, yeah. Use it. When you want custom or large changes to how the $80 theme sellers think you should run an ecommerce store... I wouldn't recommend it, and I don't know what I'd recommend, really. Other options: The Sylius project? Foxycart? Some of the commerce projects I've dealt with are doing hundreds of thousands of dollars, up to millions in sales. They were pushed to woocommerce because 'it's cheap, can do XYZ, no need for "expensive programmers", etc'. You're doing $800k in sales and have no unit tests on the code running your entire operation? On top of that you want changes to fundamental code bits, without easy to setup dev/test/staging/prod workflow or unit tests? Scares the crap out of me. But yeah, I'm not a WP-head, so perhaps you get used to that level of "seat of the pants" working? Or... you spend so much time/effort setting up custom workflow that you can now easily churn out "woocommerce" work with some level of repeatability and confidence? You're probably not on the 'cheap' end, which is often a selling point for WP/woo work. No doubt, I know that the woocommerce base is used on some big projects. I also have to imagine they had larger teams of people doing custom work fulltime for a long period of uninterrupted time. If you have that team and are doing customizations and integrations, you're not in the realm of "I need something simple that's not magento". Ultimately, it depends on your needs and skills. Solo/small team, already 'know' WP with existing skills in that world, use woo - knock yourself out. But don't color too far outside the lines.
SquareWheel 8y ago
I used it for a recent WP site and found it quite intuitive to use. The generated code is clean, and it integrates well with shortcodes and third-party content. I generally prefer code view to WYSIWYG, but it's one of the nicer editors I've used. I found some of the keyboard shortcuts to be unintuitive. Toggling between code and visual modes required four button presses. Edit>Redo is also weird as it uses Ctrl+Shift+Z, not Ctrl+Y. Overall though I think it's a positive change. I hope that Gutenberg manages to kill all those awful page builder plugins like WPBakery and Visual Composer. That would make me happy.
- pbowyer 8y ago
  > Edit>Redo is also weird as it uses Ctrl+Shift+Z, not Ctrl+Y. I am always confused which shortcut to use for Redo on Windows. Microsoft software is Ctrl+Y but I must've grown up using software that chose Ctrl+Shift+Z as that's what I always try first.
oxbird 8y ago
I really like Gutenberg. It is a different approach compared to the other sh*y editors I know. It has really great usability. Give it a chance!
sleavey 8y ago
I really like it. About 9 months ago I started working on a plugin for my workplace to turn the platform into a logbook for our researchers, and got to build from scratch for the new platform, so to be fair I am not experiencing any of my prior work breaking, but I do like what I see. Adding extra behaviour to the classic editor is fragile, especially if the feature involves adding or changing something about an existing part of the UI. Gutenberg makes this relatively simple, and at least provides a blessed way of doing this (via plugins), whereas before you relied on the structure of the editor's HTML not changing and breaking your stuff. Furthermore, everything is retrieved and sent via the REST API which seems like a great approach: it means you can reuse your plugin logic for other parts of the site, and in principle the new editor can be bolted on to some other non-Wordpress projects with only a few adaptions, and WordPress itself may one day be implemented in something other than PHP. One other thing I like is the ease of use of Gutenberg. While it takes a few extra clicks for things, novices won't care about that, and having more visual clues will really help them. Plus, the blocks now give you a way to make things truly WYSIWYG, especially shortcodes which are otherwise just short strings that only generate their content when you preview the page. Now it's possible to make blocks instead of shortcodes that render whatever needs rendered in the editor. I guess Automattic could have handled the development better, and given more time for the update to be tested and for the community to be informed and give their feedback. In 2017 they kept saying they'd release it in early 2018, which has come and gone, so I can't help but think they're pushing this out in a desperate bid to hit their original deadline at least in terms of the year. That part might bite them later, especially if there are any huge bugs yet to be discovered.
Jnr 8y ago
I like the Gutenberg approach a lot. Maybe it still requires some polishing but I think that people don't like it mostly because it is something new and they are not used to it yet.
ealhad 8y ago
I was thinking of another Gutenberg: https://github.com/Keats/gutenberg https://github.com/Keats/gutenberg / https://getgutenberg.io https://getgutenberg.io It's a static site generator.
- Keats 8y ago
  I am going to change name for the next release because of the confusion though!
  - stronglikedan 8y ago
    And miss out on the free discovery?
    - Keats 8y ago
      Not really free discovery when every search will be about the WordPress editor or Project Gutenberg and a static site generator will be on page 3-4 :/
hassanjahan 8y ago
Great points, I do believe any software has a lifecycle and WordPress is at the end of the road. Curious to see if Getneberg can change this situation.
sweetp 8y ago
tbh, ive moved away from Wordpress, I find it too bloated for my needs. I been experimenting with Jekyll, and think eventually ill move over to Hugo.
frereubu 8y ago
We build sites with complex data structures on WordPress using CMB2 for custom fields. I think Gutenberg has its place, but if you want to build anything of any real size you're going to need data structures (i.e. content types with defined relationships), and Gutenberg doesn't allow that. It's an odd kind of structured layout tool that I think will confuse a lot of people. For all their faults (which are less and less as it develops), WYSIWYG fields using TinyMCE have the massive advantage that they look like the word processors that most people are familiar with. Beyond small personal blogs I just don't think Gutenberg adds any value, and if anything muddies the water for site editors if you're using structured data and Gutenberg. We've taken the decision to disable Gutenberg entirely and just use custom fields so we can maintain stable data structures, rather than trying to crowbar that into Gutenberg somehow. All you need to do is only use custom post types without the "editor" capability, hide the Posts menu item, and define everything through CMB2 custom fields.
- andybak 8y ago
  I build Django sites often based around TinyMCE and this is my experience. If you've got a blob of content then drop in an MCE field but the minute you're dealing with structured data - WYSIWYG often makes things more complex. TinyMCE really is quite extensible and flexible if you keep to it's sweet spot. It can produce fairly clean and consistent markup based on a whitelist of elements - which is critical if you're storing HTML directly in a database field.
canhascodez 8y ago
The only way to "save" WordPress is to destroy it. The core was not written before PHP had classes, but the project chose to maintain backwards compatibility with a project that was. It's the worst popular codebase, and as this shows, it can't be modernized without changing it into something fundamentally different.
bernardlunn 8y ago
Writing as an English coder ie I code in the English language so that the human compiler can parse what I write aka more of a hack than a hacker. Wordpress.org appeals to hackers, but Wordpress.com appeals to hacks. No tech support needed, no 3am beepers because a badly behaved plugin wet the bed. So I am happy that Wordpress is slow to intro new software. Make it work and make it intuitive. Wordpress is the least annoying tech vendor - like Apple in their best days (not now sadly). Not perfect - who is? Would like better wysiwyg editing. But bigger beef is search. It sucks. I use Google to find info on my own site.
- modernerd 8y ago
  You might like to try https://searchwp.com https://searchwp.com if you're hosting your own site (it wasn't quite clear from your comment). It lets you tweak search results by giving different weights to titles, categories, excerpts, and more. I'm not affiliated, but if the default search is no good on your site it might help you get the results you expect instead.
mgkimsal 8y ago
Background: Had a walkthrough demo and code dive at our PHP group a few months ago. One of the guys in our coworking space runs a WP user group. I've used WP for some projects for years. I like it for small to medium content, but have hated doing large "dev" projects on it (ecommerce, etc) Gutenberg thoughts: It's seemed to me that much of WP success in the last several years has been driven by the ecosystem of page/theme builders, which have been built around serving various verticals. They've solved a core problem of not having easy baked-in structured data management, and Gutenberg looks like it's a first step in standardizing that. It seems the tools community will need to adapt to that, which they might, but it also seems like it might be taking away some of their value-add, and there may not be enough room higher-up the chain to add value. I don't know if there's a huge reason for some of the theme/page services to rush to support the upgraded 5.x series; if it makes it easier to switch to a competitor... will they have much incentive? This is certainly a shift in the WP world, but it feels like it's at a point where they could lose a chunk of users to competitors. For a lot of other users, though... where would they go? As with many upgrades, if the pain is too much for not much value, that's a time when people would consider other options more seriously.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
acomjean 8y ago
I did end up at the Boston wordcamp conference where one of the Gutenberg developers was speaking as the keynote. Like the article says: They see for-profit site builders: squarespace, wix ... as eating Wordpress market share and feel a need to advance Wordpress to make it competitive. They know it’s risky but they see it as an important way to stay relevant. Wordpress users seem on board with this. A lot of them aren’t developers and want easier solutions to hand their clients. (Except the guy with the “Gutenberg not in core t short”
laken 8y ago
I'm an active core-contributor to WordPress, and I maintain a core component (Privacy) currently. Even within the core-contributor community, there is a lot of friction, particularly with the "less popular" components. Accessibility was the first to snap, with the lead resigning, but not after other big contributors took long breaks when needed most. BDFL Matt hasn't helped heal the fractures and has hurt even more components since. The Privacy component, for example, was the butt of a joke during his WordCamp Europe keynote, boiling down our efforts over the past year as asking users to take cookies, which hurt Privacy team morale (the Privacy team primarily worked on creating a standardized way in the core to identify and export personal data, and help people create Privacy Policies by standardizing how plugins can identify what data they collect). The largest issue is React -- it's so different than the rest of the WordPress core, that 90% of the core developers can't work on Gutenberg issues. WordPress is primarily PHP, and if JS is used, most places jQuery is the framework of choice. It's dated, but it works quite well still. React is quite the departure from all of those technologies, and will cause gigantic rifts in the community. I do believe WordPress will survive, but with thousands of plugins lost forever due to lack of updating.
- ergo14 8y ago
  Component approach is good, but why force everyone to use React or any particular framework? Wouldn't it be better to implement this as vanilla js component? Either via web component or just plain custom element. Nowdays there are some really good solutions like quillJS or prosemirror that are not tied to particular solutions.
  - smt88 8y ago
    React is a library and can be used as a thin layer over plain JS. It's just often not used that way. As with all libraries, you still have to be good at organizing your code for it to help you in the long-run. That's a lot of the appeal (and problem) of full frameworks: it decides how to organize your code for you.
  - Raphmedia 8y ago
    It's the WYSIWYG in the admin and you can still opt out to use TinyMCE. AFAIK, the front-end of Wordpress isn't using React.
fishbone 8y ago
What are the economic opportunities for React developers with Gutenberg?
AstroJetson 8y ago
I got into WP to build a site that tracks robot teams and competition events. I didn't want to write PHP but found a great plugin called PODS. It allowed me to do all the inter-page linkage (orgs->teams->robots) without any PHP. Another plugin does calendar stuff for the events. It was quick and easy to set it up, and works pretty smoothly. I've tried Gutenberg and wasn't that impressed. It wasn't adding to anything I was doing and it managed to break two small items. I know that the WP people are trying to go against Wix, etc. I'd like to have also seen them split into the new React and kept the "classic". I'll most likely become one of the 1000's of sites that become frozen on a 4.9.x release. It will be interesting to see if there are updates in the 4.9 tree or if it will be 5.0 only. I look at the Wix, Weebly, etc market place has being worth WP going after and I'm sure they will try to pull company/vendor sites from the Facebook and I'm good with that. But one of the powers of WP is the ability to make pretty complex sites using PHP/Plugins. Moving to React isn't going to make that easy. I really think that this is a case of dumbing down a product may not be a good idea for lots of the current users.
jonheller 8y ago
I work at an agency building large websites for a variety of clients, and so far am in love with Gutenberg. The block based approach is huge, especially for many of our clients in the news and editorial space that write long pieces of content with a lot of different components (text and images of course, but also quotes, asides, interactive embeds, donations, related stories, etc).
bovermyer 8y ago
I love the Gutenberg interface. However, I also think Automattic has made life for themselves much, much harder by fragmenting the code base like this. WordPress was always monolithic in its approach, and trying to tack on a (newer, more modern, but still wholly different) core component is a major risk. I'm working on a migration plan to some other platform as part of our business continuity plan. The stability of WordPress was its biggest selling feature. Now, that will no longer exist.
lkrubner 8y ago
A bit of history: Up till 2004, the king of all blog software was Moveable Type, written in Perl. In theory, you had to pay for this, but there was a liberal free license. Then in 2004 they got strict and said, hey, everyone has to pay. This set off a movement to find another free blog software package. For awhile it seemed like there were roughly a million blog software packages, written in different languages. PHP was easy to learn, so it gained traction. Blossom was big, Typo was big. Then WordPress gained traction. During the long era when other blog software was dying, and WordPress was emerging as the clear winner, the success of WordPress was driven by the understanding of BDFL Matt that designers loved it. It worked well with software such as Dreamweaver. People came to PHP because it was easy to learn, and so WordPress should also be easy to learn. Because of this, Matt insisted that WordPress stick with PHP 4, rather than PHP 5, for many years. I believe PHP 5 had been around for 6 or 7 years before WordPress began using it. I believe Matt was worried that the Object Oriented ideas in PHP 5 would be difficult for newcomers to learn. I believe the decision to stick with easy-to-learn PHP 4 was essential to the success that WordPress enjoyed during that era. Which is why I am so surprised by Gutenberg. Telling the whole community that they need to learn React is a shocking change of tactics. Instead of focusing on easy-to-learn, WordPress suddenly wants to become best-of-breed? That is a different niche in the ecosystem of CMSs. Once a good value Honda, WordPress now wants to be the high quality BMW. React radically increases the amount that new developers will have to learn to become proficient with WordPress. And if you're asking developers to radically increase their investment, then suddenly they are going to consider other options, such as Ruby On Rails. If WordPress suddenly becomes one of those frameworks that needs 2 years of hard study before you really understand it, then maybe you should be learning some other framework during those 2 years? Because there is also a lot of ugliness and technical debt in WordPress, things that made sense when the focus was "make life easy for designers" but which don't make sense if the goal is "be the best framework." I was around in 2001 when PHP-Nuke decided to go down a similar road. The decision was made that it would be refactored into a series of components, each of which would have an elegant interface for interacting with the other components. PHP-Nuke was going to clean up its technical debt, become more secure, adopt best practices. But previously it had been playing the role of "easiest way to set up a blog or forum". It gave up one role and tried to become something else completely. It self-destructed. Two years later it was dead, no one was using it. It seems to me that WordPress is going down the same road as PHP-Nuke. Obviously WordPress is a much bigger community than PHP-Nuke ever was, but it seems like it is making the same kind of mistake. I thought Matt was extremely wise for sticking with PHP 4 for so long, but Gutenberg seems like the kind of mistake he would have been making if he'd adopted PHP 5 too soon.
ukyrgf 8y ago
I thought this article was pretty insightful, regarding Gutenberg and Automattic's response to the open source community: https://foliovision.com/2018/10/gutenberg-f35-of-cms https://foliovision.com/2018/10/gutenberg-f35-of-cms And since then, these two troubling things have happened: Oct 9, Accessibility team lead resigns over Gutenberg - https://wptavern.com/wordpress-accessibility-team-lead-resigns-cites-political-complications-related-to-gutenberg https://wptavern.com/wordpress-accessibility-team-lead-resig... Oct 17, Accessibility audit canceled, because the new accessibility team lead "didn’t have the authority to authorize it in the first place" - https://wptavern.com/gutenberg-accessibility-audit-postponed-indefinitely https://wptavern.com/gutenberg-accessibility-audit-postponed...
lucideer 8y ago
As someone who has always loathed Wordpress and everything connected to it and its ecosystem, I've switched over a Wordpress install I—reluctantly—voluntarily maintain in my spare time, and been extremely pleasantly surprised. I've worked with Wordpress a lot over the years, so I'm very familiar with its inner workings: this is what's largely motivated me to avoid it when possible, and unfortunately prevented me from contributing to the project. Given my initial reaction to Gutenberg, I'm imagining the community at large will hate it. The Wordpress community is one that champions amateur, dangerous, big-ball-of-mud software development, under the guise of being "beginner friendly" (where "beginner" = "not experienced enough to be leading clients to believe they can provide professional-grade solutions"). This is a mindset that favours hacks and tech debt. over refactoring, and Gutenberg is definitely going to force both plugin and theme developers to rethink, and rewrite their approach (in a positive way, imo). If it successfully brings Wordpress out of the dark-ages, that's great obviously. If it makes Drupal more pleasant and easy-to-use for editors: also nice. If it kills Wordpress due to its community migrating away, then at least it could leave room for some more modern competitor. I just hope the core devs don't do a U-turn on Gutenberg.
- scottybowl 8y ago
  In a word: ClassicPress.. The community is already migrating
  - scarecrowbob 8y ago
    I keep hearing folks say this, but it feels very astroturfed to me... I totally can be wrong about that feeling, but it's my feeling and I own it.
    - shinoda 8y ago
      Ironic you mention the astroturfing, as the person you replied to is the creator of ClassicPress ;) The creator likes to namedrop ClassicPress everywhere on the WP.org forums and WPTavern. He's had his posts removed from the wp.org forums due to spam too.
  - 8y ago
coding123 8y ago
This is a step in the right direction. -someone that stopped using WordPress when porn started appearing automatically in random folders because the view tech is php
nqzero 8y ago
anyone have a sense whether this frontend could be decoupled from the php backend ?
- phonon 8y ago
  Would love to know as well!
pier25 8y ago
I get that Automattic wants to compete with Wix, etc, but throwing the Wordpress community and ecosystem under the bus is not the way to go. Gutenberg has its place in the web dev world of 2018 but it should have been a completely new project instead of a replacement of good old Wordpress.
photomatt 8y ago
Howdy — lead of WordPress here. When the article was written in January of 2018, I would agree Gutenberg wasn't ready for core. Ten months later, it's come a long way. There have been 41 public releases of Gutenberg, and close to 600,000 sites are using it already. It's the mostly widely tested (and adopted) new feature code we've had in any release of WordPress in my memory. It might not be for everyone, which is why we created the Classic Editor plugin which you can install today, and when 5.0 comes out in a few weeks your site will look and work pretty much exactly like it does today, and you can migrate to Gutenberg at your leisure, or perhaps not at all. (There are lots of ways to post and interact with WordPress, including the command line via wp-cli.) A big advantage of blocks is they will allow us to simplify many of the different concepts and interfaces throughout WordPress, including our old WYSIWYG sorta-blocks, shortcodes, widgets, menus, and embeds of all types. It solves literally hundreds of interactions where people used to get stuck in our old WYSIWYG and either switch to code view to fix things, or just give up. Like all software, the 5.0 release of WordPress isn't a finish line, it's a starting one. We are already planning for 5.1 and beyond (including minimum PHP updates) and we look forward to bringing the fast, public iteration cycle that Gutenberg has demonstrated to more parts of core.
- laken 8y ago
  Hey Matt! I'm not denying the massive amount of testing and effort going into Gutenberg, as I do see it. I am however worried about the new block editor hurting the good reputation WordPress has, particularly in regards to accessibility. Hacker News isn't the right place for this discussion, I know, but I want to get it out there. Accessibility is one of the best features of WordPress, even if most people don't know about it. Keeping the WordPress editor accessible not only helps people with disabilities, as it also aids people who may have a temporary ailment (holding their baby, and just having one hand available, for example), or even "invisible" disabilities such as dyslexia, ADHD, or an Autism Spectrum disorder. The new block editor has made tremendous strides at improving individual component's accessibility recently, and I believe that's where the confusion and miscommunication comes in between all the core teams. Code-wise, the block editor is quite accessible; zoomed out, the editor as a whole isn't. It's a UX issue, more than a development one. It's what happens when the design isn't with accessibility in mind. I don't think it's worth punting release, but I really would like to see more work on documentation and warnings in the core to people who rely on assistive technologies. If you don't know the layout of the block editor and had to navigate it with only a keyboard and no eyesight, it's incredibly confusing! If there was proper documentation, you might be able to explain the layout and mechanics, which would help, though still not solve all the problems. If someone is blind and has a blog, in my experience, 90% of them use WordPress because it's very friendly to them when they want to write. It's not a fair comparison, as TinyMCE merely is a glorified text-field, but that's also one of the old selling points of WordPress -- super simple out of the box. It's my understanding that a lot of the preliminary design for Gutenberg was behind closed doors inside of Automattic, before publicly being brought out to the public and collaboration ensued. I don't believe there is anything wrong with this, as it happens within many FLOSS projects by corporate interests that rely on the platform. I do though wish that in the initial design phase, accessibility was a goal, not an afterthought. It may have been a goal too, not denying that, but there might have been a lack of expertise in regards to how to make interfaces fully accessible. I don't mean to attack the editor, Automattic, or you about this. I know you've heard a lot about it. I love the block editor; it's such a pleasant experience for me to use. I worry that people though who aren't as able-bodied as I won't feel the same though. Finally, I have a hunch that Automattic itself has now found that it needs expertise on Accessibility, which is why there's this: https://automattic.com/work-with-us/product-designer-accessibility/ https://automattic.com/work-with-us/product-designer-accessi... I do believe in WordPress.org, and I love Automattic as a company and their stance in regards to the open web. I like that Automattic is a company built on my personal-favorite legal document, the GNU GPL. I'm looking forward to the day that the block editor is accessible, as it's not now. I do believe it will be. I only wish there was a stronger push before :)
bookofjoe 8y ago
It would appear that I'm the only one reading this who uses TypePad (since 2004). True, it's clunky, unchanging, and very slow — but that translates to ease of use and reliability.
corradomatt 8y ago
The thing that really concerns me with WordPress and Gutenberg is performance. Gutenberg is great but there is never much concern to making the front-end less top heavy. Gutenberg is likely to make this worse. Each block will add it's own CSS and JS...and the bloat will be immense. Instead of users adding a single page builder plugin, they'll add a whole bunch of individual blocks and each one will load more and more external scripts. PageSpeed scores will be dismal.
- photomatt 8y ago
  Blocks need not do that, and most should be no more overhead than what people were already doing in posts. Perhaps is a big focus though, but one that's been easier to address outside of core with things like expanded CDN support in the latest version of Jetpack Photon.

237 points by smacktoward 8y ago

The way data is stored is very frustrating. Storing what should be json as html so it could try to be backwards compatible. I made a library[1] to make blocks so I’ve been using Gutenberg a few months. Feels like it could be really really nice if a few changes were made. I commend the WP community for making it though. Big issues are with trying to make more than just a few blocks, the editor really doesn’t enforce and code splitting. So unless you’re using a library like the one I created, having let’s say, 100 blocks is going to mean an insane amount of JS on page load. Also, good luck trying to debug the stack traces you’ll get in browser. I could go on but the point is: Gutenberg is a nice idea but real projects will find issues. [1] https://github.com/Crossfield/gutenblock https://github.com/Crossfield/gutenblock

matt4077 8y ago

I did not know that their motto is: > ‘Clean, Lean, and Mean’ And even after double-checking, I can only assume it's somewhat outdated, or outright irony. Because while I consider WP among the software that has done the most good over the last few decades, those three words really don't come to mind when trying to describe it. Of course at the time it came out it's immediate comparisons where these $7-digit behemoths being sold to Fortune 500 companies, and it probably did not rely on plugins as much as it does now. So I can see how clean & mean made sense at the time.

lbriner 8y ago
I think they mean the core is clean, lean and mean. The reality is that most people will use themes, customisations of themes and a stack of plugins so what you end up with on disk is none of the above. Most of us never have to touch the core though.
- rocketpastsix 8y ago
  The core is a mess too. And they refuse to modernize their code.

musgrove 8y ago

WordPress is having their "Thesis 2" moment. Ironic, really.

sandov 8y ago

I got scared from the title because I thought that project Gutenberg[1] had died or something [1]https://www.gutenberg.org/ https://www.gutenberg.org/

thrower123 8y ago
What an incredible shame that would be! I just hope that we can get some copyright reform someday, at least for non-Disney entities. It's absurd that it can be easier to find a bestseller from 1850 than one from 1950.

smacktoward 8y ago

Personally, as someone who makes a living building stuff on WordPress, I am extremely concerned about this transition. First off, I don't think Automattic has handled communicating it very well. Gutenberg is going to be a big, seismic change in what WordPress is. It seems reasonable to expect lots of themes and plugins will break when it goes live, especially older ones that haven't been as actively maintained. And yet, if you surveyed the global WordPress userbase, I'd be amazed if you found even 10% of them were aware that such a change is even on the horizon. The communication to developers around Gutenberg has been hit or miss, but at least they've been making an effort on that front. In terms of communicating to the general WP-using public, other than a notice in the dashboard in the most recent version, I'm not aware of there having actually been any. So there are going to be a lot of "WTF" moments when people update to 5.0 and things start breaking or behaving contrary to expectations. Secondly, I fear that Gutenberg is going to split the WordPress developer community. WP has always been a PHP project; if you wanted to contribute, whether to WP core itself or by writing themes or plugins, PHP was the language you needed to know to do that. Gutenberg, however, is all React-based, which means now there will be two classes of WP developers: people working on things that don't touch Gutenberg, who will be writing PHP, and people working on things that do, who will be writing JavaScript/React. (My suspicion, even though Automattic has denied it strenuously, is that the master plan is to slowly phase out PHP and turn WordPress into a React-only project. So after Gutenberg, we will see more and more components of WP getting rewritten in React, until one day there just won't be any PHP left anymore.) Thing is, I don't know a lot of PHP developers who are also React whizzes, or vice versa. So I fear that Automattic is taking one of the core reasons for WordPress' success, its absolutely huge developer community, and throwing it overboard. If the plan really is for WP to become a React project, a whole lot of PHP developers are going to need to become React developers in relatively short order. Some will be able to make that transition, but I worry that many will not. Maybe it will pick up enough new React fans to make up for them, I dunno. But that seems like an optimistic read to me. The more I learn about Gutenberg, the more I wish Automattic had just started a second, React-based project and used that as a clean sheet of paper, rather than taking all these ideas and trying to jam them into WordPress to make some sort of software turducken.

partiallypro 8y ago

hbcondo714 8y ago

This article was published in Jan 10, 2018; what's the current state of Gutenberg?

kkoppenhaver 8y ago
Gutenberg has been progressing on GitHub. It just got merged into the beta version of WP 5.0 release today, which is slated for general release on November 19.
pilif 8y ago
Will be the default in 5.0 of which Beta 1 has just been released (which probably prompted this submission)

exotree 8y ago

This article is a year old. Does anyone know the current status of the Gutenberg release? Article says first half of 2018 and we are well past that.

egypturnash 8y ago
It's far enough along that they're actively pushing it at people who update their WP installations. There's a big banner on the front of the dashboard urging you to try the FUTURE OF WORDPRESS. I did. I went back to the old ways.
kkoppenhaver 8y ago
The 1st beta of WordPress 5.0 was released today (which includes Gutenberg). Outside of discovering any major blockers, the current plan is to release 5.0 on November 19.
- Tallain 8y ago
  3.5 weeks feels awfully short to go from beta to production on a change so big. Isn't Gutenberg going to be the new default, no opt-out? Kind of makes me nervous.
  - kkoppenhaver 8y ago
    You can still opt-out by installing the Classic Editor plugin[1]. That will disable Gutenberg and let you keep the current experience. [1]https://wordpress.org/plugins/classic-editor/ https://wordpress.org/plugins/classic-editor/
    - Tallain 8y ago
      Beautiful! Also, that makes perfect sense. Thank you for the link!
    - frereubu 8y ago
      There's also this plugin which removes all other references to Gutenberg so if you're building sites for clients they aren't able to accidentally switch the classic editor off, and don't get nag screens about trying Gutenberg. https://wordpress.org/plugins/classic-editor-addon/ https://wordpress.org/plugins/classic-editor-addon/

rustcharm 8y ago

It's the end, but it would have died anyway. While WordPress's success is amazing, it's still a pile of PHP that requires constant diligence to keep it running safely. I use it myself for a simple corporate blog, because it's so widely supported and everything else sucks even worse....

x3sphere 8y ago
> I use it myself for a simple corporate blog, because it's so widely supported and everything else sucks even worse.... So how is it the end if everything else sucks? Maybe they are stumbling here with Gutenberg (I haven't tried it or even researched it much), but it seems far from the end. I still don't expect anything to overtake WP. A big reason is that too many agencies rely on it at this point, they aren't going to want to switch to anything else. Also for lower budget clients, pitching anything other than WP is a hard sell these days, as an increasing amount of non tech-savvy users are familiar with it.
ddnb 8y ago
> and everything else sucks even worse That's why it's not the end.
NegativeLatency 8y ago
Are you not able to use a static site gernerator? Or do non technical people need to update it?

NeedMoreTea 8y ago

Having trialled the new offering thanks to a banner in my Wordpress dashboard, I went right back to the old editor. Trouble with the new one is the UX is hostile - everything needs an extra dozen clicks for the most simple things. I want to publish a post about as fast as writing a text or word doc. The current wordpress editor is unexciting but has a fairly decent workflow. Faffing about with everything on a pulldown or modal is not progress. A fair summary of my views of Gutenberg: https://www.dedoimedo.com/computers/wordpress-gutenberg.html https://www.dedoimedo.com/computers/wordpress-gutenberg.html

Angostura 8y ago
It may need a few extra click for simple things. But it makes slightly more complex things much simpler
- jononor 8y ago
  But most of the time one does simple things. Hurting the common case to improve a rare case is rarely a good tradeoff.
  - zaphar 8y ago
    The common case for wordpress hasn't been just blogging for quite some time now. The common case is brochure sites for businesses. I wouldn't be surprised to find that writing a simple blog post is actually the rare use case these days.
    - at-fates-hands 8y ago
      This is the Achilles heel of Wordpress. WP is now getting a a TON of competition from static site generators, and companies like Netlify. Headless CMS' and Jamstack are the future for these types of sites and people are coming off of Drupal and Wordpress in huge numbers. As their numbers have shrunk, they've had to make drastic changes. I haven't been seriously involved in the WP community for about five years, but I've heard rumblings within the community about moving to a modern stack that includes ReactJS or VueJS for a while now. At the very least they're trying to maintain their position and modernize WP to appease some of the critics and vocal members of their community.

ttty 8y ago

Have tried it? It's really buggy. The head of UX quit because of the amount of bugs. Not only technical bugs, the UI is poorly designed.

dallen33 8y ago
"The head of UX quit" - source?
cferthorney 8y ago
I thought it was the lead of accessibility, Rien Rietveld, who quit? The article announcing Riet's resignation is https://rianrietveld.com/2018/10/09/i-have-resigned-the-wordpress-accessibility-team/ https://rianrietveld.com/2018/10/09/i-have-resigned-the-word... (Working at time of writing this comment)
- sirmac1k 8y ago
  After reading resignation you've linked... That's no way to lead an innovation. Especially for such a big FOSS project. Automattic's position of quite verbally "throwing" Gutenberg at users and developers at any cost just shows a really bad example of business driven FOSS project as a base for commercial product (.org for .com). A11y is just one of the victims. Other community members creating WordPress based websites, services and plugins (myself included) are mostly thrown overboard as a collateral damage. Either learn react fast and figure Gutenberg out by yourself or maybe we'll let you come back later if and when we get to work at least on some documentation and the well-known issues that affect you. With Gutenberg's extensibility being the biggest and most harming one for WP ecosystem.

kkoppenhaver 8y ago

Commented a couple times here, but we've been making a concerted effort to inform past clients of the coming of Gutenberg. It seems that outside of the dev community and people actively involved in WordPress news, there's very little familiarity with the fact that Gutenberg is coming. We've launched a productized service[1] that helps people take an audit of their site, get familiar with using Gutenberg and give them resources to make the transition. We've mostly found that's it's been going smoothly, but there are plenty of cases where sites have different customizations that will need to be worked around or refactored. The Gutenberg team is working hard on making sure legacy things are handled properly, but there's a lot out there and it definitely needs to be taken on a case by case basis. [1]https://alphaparticle.com/gutenberg https://alphaparticle.com/gutenberg

snowwrestler 8y ago

I think Gutenberg solves the wrong problem for Wordpress. I don't think that many people were crying out for a fancier way to store giant messy blobs in MySQL. Why does someone select Wordpress in 2018? Why even host a website at all? Because they want to build something custom. But because Wordpress core continues to be basically a simple blog engine, anything fancy has to get implemented as custom code and/or super powerful themes and plugins that are almost like mini CMSs unto themselves. This is where a lot of the security problems in Wordpress sites often come from, BTW. IMO Wordpress could do a lot more for itself long term by improving the flexibility and power of its core, rather than its WYSIWYG.

gboudrias 8y ago
I'm sort-of leaving tech, but I've worked in web dev for 8 years, and this is the first I hear of Gutenberg. From what I understand, it's better WYSIWYG. Great, but we have entire essays demonstrating how WYSIWYG is garbage. Alright but people want WYSIWYG! To me, this seems like a manifestation of the limits inherent to the simplification of UI. The frontend needs complex information to be able to correctly produce a beautiful design. Ultimately, the user needs to be aware of the concepts (too complex, apparently), or the design needs to be automated and therefore simplistic. WYSIWYG is the unhappy compromise demonstrating that consistency begets complexity. If this dilemma really is unsolvable, then Wordpress is but one of iteration in a grand cycle of its victims. I worked mainly with Drupal, and the situation there isn't much better, they've simply opted for sophistication over usability.
- andybak 8y ago
  > we have entire essays demonstrating how WYSIWYG is garbage. I would dispute all of those essays. Explain to me what we do instead of WYSIWIG and if your answer is anything like Markdown then you've never observed real users. Hell - I hate markdown and I'm a developer. I do not understand the desire to trash WYSIWIG other than reverse Ludditism.
  - spiderfarmer 8y ago

quipper 8y ago

Gutenberg converts tasks that used to take 2-3 clicks into 10-20 click tasks, or even worse makes them impossible altogether. What is with catering to the worst and most clueless users only? We need more than that. We deserve more than that. Gutenberg is disastrous for anyone with an IQ above that of a carrot. But are there any real alternatives?

ubernostrum 8y ago
What is with catering to the worst and most clueless users only? We need more than that. We deserve more than that. Gutenberg is disastrous for anyone with an IQ above that of a carrot. Well, insulting hyperbole certainly isn't going to help. From what I can tell (I haven't used Wordpress in a long time, so I didn't know about this), the main complaint is it's more touch-optimized, and as a result desktop editing with trackpad/mouse is more complex. That's a fair criticism, but not a conclusive argument against. If the most common use case for non-technical users is a touch interface, then making that the default, and giving highly-technical users who prefer the old editor a way to swap back to it... seems like a perfectly reasonable decision to me, and one that should be made on the basis of user research and usage stats, not on the basis of people who sling insults and leave 1-star reviews on a plugin marketplace.

aritmo 8y ago

Gutenberg allows to write structured documents just like you should do with a word processor. I can imagine many people having trouble to adapt because they are not familiar with using styles and templates. I was not familiar with Gutenberg and was offered to activate it a few months ago. I did so and manage to make it work for me. I consider that writing structured documents is part of personal advancement in IT and should be viewed as such.

sharmi 8y ago

Fyi, I would really like to keep as far away as possible from wordpress. On the other hand, while everyone predicts the death of wordpress, there is still no viable alternative. So many projects on Indiehackers start on wordpress still. There is still no customizable, verstaile alternative for wordpress in spite of its many failings. If there is an alternative with an ecosystem as big as wordpress, or atleast has the growth potential to become one, I am very eager to know.

mgkimsal 8y ago
> If there is an alternative with an ecosystem as big as wordpress, or atleast has the growth potential to become one, I am very eager to know. There probably won't be, because it would introduce many of the same problems WP has. If you want an ecommerce platform, there are plenty to choose from. Throwing 'woocommerce' on top of your blog solves some problems, but creates (many) others, and if your focus is ecommerce, use a more focused platform. It's the "it can do everything for all people" aspect which has created some of the problems we see.
- CM30 8y ago
  To be honest, I'd say WooCommerce is probably one of the easiest to use solutions for eCommerce. I mean, Magento is complicated enough that whole companies exist around it and where anything less than a VPS is probably not gonna handle it well, and OpenCart is a bit of a car crash when it comes to figuring out where to get support/decent plugins/documentation. Given those types of alternatives, well, at least WooCommerce is simple enough to pick up for someone who's used WordPress before, and doesn't require learning a whole second overly bloated/complicated CMS system to set up. What is the best solution for a decent shop nowadays? At least if you want to host it yourself and not rely on a service like Shopify?
  - mgkimsal 8y ago
    i briefly inherited a woocommerce system with 62 plugins, and because it was so 'easy', the original devs hadn't bothered with things like child themes or version control or documenting any thing they did or why. The WP ecosystem doesn't easily allow for dev sites / testing, and at least one of the plugins was tied to a domain name and wasn't easy to use on non-prod systems. Paid support from some plugin vendors always ends up with "disable all plugins except ours first and run everything that way before you ask for anything else". "Even the plugins that this one depends on?" I'd ask, to no reply. I understand why, but plugin vendors will point the finger at other plugins - sometimes rightly so - but when so many plugins can change global state all the time, it's a pain to track down what's breaking. Any time I bring experiences like this up, I'm told "no one has 60 plugins, that's horrendous, I'd never have more than 5 plugins on any WP project ever, you should have started over, you're exaggerating" - some combination of those sentiments. There were 62 (or 65) plugins - IIRC somewhere around 10-12 weren't actively used. When I inherit projects, I often argue for greenfield rebuilds with the lessons learned from the previous project. When that goes through, I often hit a valley of "we should have refactored". When starting off on the "refactor" path, I often hit a valley of "this should have been rebuilt". There's often not much way to put good tests around WP stuff to get the confidence and repeatability needed to move forward with large scale customizations. If you start from scratch, have a talented team who understands all aspects of WP development and document things, perhaps it's "good" to start with? If you're selling a handful of items... yeah. If you're happy with existing themes and don't want any substantive behavioural changes to how themes/plugins work, yeah. Use it. When you want custom or large changes to how the $80 theme sellers think you should run an ecommerce store... I wouldn't recommend it, and I don't know what I'd recommend, really. Other options: The Sylius project? Foxycart? Some of the commerce projects I've dealt with are doing hundreds of thousands of dollars, up to millions in sales. They were pushed to woocommerce because 'it's cheap, can do XYZ, no need for "expensive programmers", etc'. You're doing $800k in sales and have no unit tests on the code running your entire operation? On top of that you want changes to fundamental code bits, without easy to setup dev/test/staging/prod workflow or unit tests? Scares the crap out of me. But yeah, I'm not a WP-head, so perhaps you get used to that level of "seat of the pants" working? Or... you spend so much time/effort setting up custom workflow that you can now easily churn out "woocommerce" work with some level of repeatability and confidence? You're probably not on the 'cheap' end, which is often a selling point for WP/woo work. No doubt, I know that the woocommerce base is used on some big projects. I also have to imagine they had larger teams of people doing custom work fulltime for a long period of uninterrupted time. If you have that team and are doing customizations and integrations, you're not in the realm of "I need something simple that's not magento". Ultimately, it depends on your needs and skills. Solo/small team, already 'know' WP with existing skills in that world, use woo - knock yourself out. But don't color too far outside the lines.

SquareWheel 8y ago

I used it for a recent WP site and found it quite intuitive to use. The generated code is clean, and it integrates well with shortcodes and third-party content. I generally prefer code view to WYSIWYG, but it's one of the nicer editors I've used. I found some of the keyboard shortcuts to be unintuitive. Toggling between code and visual modes required four button presses. Edit>Redo is also weird as it uses Ctrl+Shift+Z, not Ctrl+Y. Overall though I think it's a positive change. I hope that Gutenberg manages to kill all those awful page builder plugins like WPBakery and Visual Composer. That would make me happy.

pbowyer 8y ago
> Edit>Redo is also weird as it uses Ctrl+Shift+Z, not Ctrl+Y. I am always confused which shortcut to use for Redo on Windows. Microsoft software is Ctrl+Y but I must've grown up using software that chose Ctrl+Shift+Z as that's what I always try first.

oxbird 8y ago

I really like Gutenberg. It is a different approach compared to the other sh*y editors I know. It has really great usability. Give it a chance!

sleavey 8y ago

I really like it. About 9 months ago I started working on a plugin for my workplace to turn the platform into a logbook for our researchers, and got to build from scratch for the new platform, so to be fair I am not experiencing any of my prior work breaking, but I do like what I see. Adding extra behaviour to the classic editor is fragile, especially if the feature involves adding or changing something about an existing part of the UI. Gutenberg makes this relatively simple, and at least provides a blessed way of doing this (via plugins), whereas before you relied on the structure of the editor's HTML not changing and breaking your stuff. Furthermore, everything is retrieved and sent via the REST API which seems like a great approach: it means you can reuse your plugin logic for other parts of the site, and in principle the new editor can be bolted on to some other non-Wordpress projects with only a few adaptions, and WordPress itself may one day be implemented in something other than PHP. One other thing I like is the ease of use of Gutenberg. While it takes a few extra clicks for things, novices won't care about that, and having more visual clues will really help them. Plus, the blocks now give you a way to make things truly WYSIWYG, especially shortcodes which are otherwise just short strings that only generate their content when you preview the page. Now it's possible to make blocks instead of shortcodes that render whatever needs rendered in the editor. I guess Automattic could have handled the development better, and given more time for the update to be tested and for the community to be informed and give their feedback. In 2017 they kept saying they'd release it in early 2018, which has come and gone, so I can't help but think they're pushing this out in a desperate bid to hit their original deadline at least in terms of the year. That part might bite them later, especially if there are any huge bugs yet to be discovered.

Jnr 8y ago

I like the Gutenberg approach a lot. Maybe it still requires some polishing but I think that people don't like it mostly because it is something new and they are not used to it yet.

ealhad 8y ago

I was thinking of another Gutenberg: https://github.com/Keats/gutenberg https://github.com/Keats/gutenberg / https://getgutenberg.io https://getgutenberg.io It's a static site generator.

Keats 8y ago
I am going to change name for the next release because of the confusion though!
- stronglikedan 8y ago
  And miss out on the free discovery?
  - Keats 8y ago
    Not really free discovery when every search will be about the WordPress editor or Project Gutenberg and a static site generator will be on page 3-4 :/

hassanjahan 8y ago

Great points, I do believe any software has a lifecycle and WordPress is at the end of the road. Curious to see if Getneberg can change this situation.

sweetp 8y ago

tbh, ive moved away from Wordpress, I find it too bloated for my needs. I been experimenting with Jekyll, and think eventually ill move over to Hugo.

frereubu 8y ago

We build sites with complex data structures on WordPress using CMB2 for custom fields. I think Gutenberg has its place, but if you want to build anything of any real size you're going to need data structures (i.e. content types with defined relationships), and Gutenberg doesn't allow that. It's an odd kind of structured layout tool that I think will confuse a lot of people. For all their faults (which are less and less as it develops), WYSIWYG fields using TinyMCE have the massive advantage that they look like the word processors that most people are familiar with. Beyond small personal blogs I just don't think Gutenberg adds any value, and if anything muddies the water for site editors if you're using structured data and Gutenberg. We've taken the decision to disable Gutenberg entirely and just use custom fields so we can maintain stable data structures, rather than trying to crowbar that into Gutenberg somehow. All you need to do is only use custom post types without the "editor" capability, hide the Posts menu item, and define everything through CMB2 custom fields.

andybak 8y ago
I build Django sites often based around TinyMCE and this is my experience. If you've got a blob of content then drop in an MCE field but the minute you're dealing with structured data - WYSIWYG often makes things more complex. TinyMCE really is quite extensible and flexible if you keep to it's sweet spot. It can produce fairly clean and consistent markup based on a whitelist of elements - which is critical if you're storing HTML directly in a database field.

canhascodez 8y ago

The only way to "save" WordPress is to destroy it. The core was not written before PHP had classes, but the project chose to maintain backwards compatibility with a project that was. It's the worst popular codebase, and as this shows, it can't be modernized without changing it into something fundamentally different.

bernardlunn 8y ago

Writing as an English coder ie I code in the English language so that the human compiler can parse what I write aka more of a hack than a hacker. Wordpress.org appeals to hackers, but Wordpress.com appeals to hacks. No tech support needed, no 3am beepers because a badly behaved plugin wet the bed. So I am happy that Wordpress is slow to intro new software. Make it work and make it intuitive. Wordpress is the least annoying tech vendor - like Apple in their best days (not now sadly). Not perfect - who is? Would like better wysiwyg editing. But bigger beef is search. It sucks. I use Google to find info on my own site.

modernerd 8y ago
You might like to try https://searchwp.com https://searchwp.com if you're hosting your own site (it wasn't quite clear from your comment). It lets you tweak search results by giving different weights to titles, categories, excerpts, and more. I'm not affiliated, but if the default search is no good on your site it might help you get the results you expect instead.

mgkimsal 8y ago

Background: Had a walkthrough demo and code dive at our PHP group a few months ago. One of the guys in our coworking space runs a WP user group. I've used WP for some projects for years. I like it for small to medium content, but have hated doing large "dev" projects on it (ecommerce, etc) Gutenberg thoughts: It's seemed to me that much of WP success in the last several years has been driven by the ecosystem of page/theme builders, which have been built around serving various verticals. They've solved a core problem of not having easy baked-in structured data management, and Gutenberg looks like it's a first step in standardizing that. It seems the tools community will need to adapt to that, which they might, but it also seems like it might be taking away some of their value-add, and there may not be enough room higher-up the chain to add value. I don't know if there's a huge reason for some of the theme/page services to rush to support the upgraded 5.x series; if it makes it easier to switch to a competitor... will they have much incentive? This is certainly a shift in the WP world, but it feels like it's at a point where they could lose a chunk of users to competitors. For a lot of other users, though... where would they go? As with many upgrades, if the pain is too much for not much value, that's a time when people would consider other options more seriously.

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acomjean 8y ago

I did end up at the Boston wordcamp conference where one of the Gutenberg developers was speaking as the keynote. Like the article says: They see for-profit site builders: squarespace, wix ... as eating Wordpress market share and feel a need to advance Wordpress to make it competitive. They know it’s risky but they see it as an important way to stay relevant. Wordpress users seem on board with this. A lot of them aren’t developers and want easier solutions to hand their clients. (Except the guy with the “Gutenberg not in core t short”

laken 8y ago

I'm an active core-contributor to WordPress, and I maintain a core component (Privacy) currently. Even within the core-contributor community, there is a lot of friction, particularly with the "less popular" components. Accessibility was the first to snap, with the lead resigning, but not after other big contributors took long breaks when needed most. BDFL Matt hasn't helped heal the fractures and has hurt even more components since. The Privacy component, for example, was the butt of a joke during his WordCamp Europe keynote, boiling down our efforts over the past year as asking users to take cookies, which hurt Privacy team morale (the Privacy team primarily worked on creating a standardized way in the core to identify and export personal data, and help people create Privacy Policies by standardizing how plugins can identify what data they collect). The largest issue is React -- it's so different than the rest of the WordPress core, that 90% of the core developers can't work on Gutenberg issues. WordPress is primarily PHP, and if JS is used, most places jQuery is the framework of choice. It's dated, but it works quite well still. React is quite the departure from all of those technologies, and will cause gigantic rifts in the community. I do believe WordPress will survive, but with thousands of plugins lost forever due to lack of updating.

ergo14 8y ago
Component approach is good, but why force everyone to use React or any particular framework? Wouldn't it be better to implement this as vanilla js component? Either via web component or just plain custom element. Nowdays there are some really good solutions like quillJS or prosemirror that are not tied to particular solutions.
- smt88 8y ago
  React is a library and can be used as a thin layer over plain JS. It's just often not used that way. As with all libraries, you still have to be good at organizing your code for it to help you in the long-run. That's a lot of the appeal (and problem) of full frameworks: it decides how to organize your code for you.
- Raphmedia 8y ago
  It's the WYSIWYG in the admin and you can still opt out to use TinyMCE. AFAIK, the front-end of Wordpress isn't using React.

fishbone 8y ago

What are the economic opportunities for React developers with Gutenberg?

AstroJetson 8y ago

I got into WP to build a site that tracks robot teams and competition events. I didn't want to write PHP but found a great plugin called PODS. It allowed me to do all the inter-page linkage (orgs->teams->robots) without any PHP. Another plugin does calendar stuff for the events. It was quick and easy to set it up, and works pretty smoothly. I've tried Gutenberg and wasn't that impressed. It wasn't adding to anything I was doing and it managed to break two small items. I know that the WP people are trying to go against Wix, etc. I'd like to have also seen them split into the new React and kept the "classic". I'll most likely become one of the 1000's of sites that become frozen on a 4.9.x release. It will be interesting to see if there are updates in the 4.9 tree or if it will be 5.0 only. I look at the Wix, Weebly, etc market place has being worth WP going after and I'm sure they will try to pull company/vendor sites from the Facebook and I'm good with that. But one of the powers of WP is the ability to make pretty complex sites using PHP/Plugins. Moving to React isn't going to make that easy. I really think that this is a case of dumbing down a product may not be a good idea for lots of the current users.

jonheller 8y ago

I work at an agency building large websites for a variety of clients, and so far am in love with Gutenberg. The block based approach is huge, especially for many of our clients in the news and editorial space that write long pieces of content with a lot of different components (text and images of course, but also quotes, asides, interactive embeds, donations, related stories, etc).

bovermyer 8y ago

I love the Gutenberg interface. However, I also think Automattic has made life for themselves much, much harder by fragmenting the code base like this. WordPress was always monolithic in its approach, and trying to tack on a (newer, more modern, but still wholly different) core component is a major risk. I'm working on a migration plan to some other platform as part of our business continuity plan. The stability of WordPress was its biggest selling feature. Now, that will no longer exist.

lkrubner 8y ago

A bit of history: Up till 2004, the king of all blog software was Moveable Type, written in Perl. In theory, you had to pay for this, but there was a liberal free license. Then in 2004 they got strict and said, hey, everyone has to pay. This set off a movement to find another free blog software package. For awhile it seemed like there were roughly a million blog software packages, written in different languages. PHP was easy to learn, so it gained traction. Blossom was big, Typo was big. Then WordPress gained traction. During the long era when other blog software was dying, and WordPress was emerging as the clear winner, the success of WordPress was driven by the understanding of BDFL Matt that designers loved it. It worked well with software such as Dreamweaver. People came to PHP because it was easy to learn, and so WordPress should also be easy to learn. Because of this, Matt insisted that WordPress stick with PHP 4, rather than PHP 5, for many years. I believe PHP 5 had been around for 6 or 7 years before WordPress began using it. I believe Matt was worried that the Object Oriented ideas in PHP 5 would be difficult for newcomers to learn. I believe the decision to stick with easy-to-learn PHP 4 was essential to the success that WordPress enjoyed during that era. Which is why I am so surprised by Gutenberg. Telling the whole community that they need to learn React is a shocking change of tactics. Instead of focusing on easy-to-learn, WordPress suddenly wants to become best-of-breed? That is a different niche in the ecosystem of CMSs. Once a good value Honda, WordPress now wants to be the high quality BMW. React radically increases the amount that new developers will have to learn to become proficient with WordPress. And if you're asking developers to radically increase their investment, then suddenly they are going to consider other options, such as Ruby On Rails. If WordPress suddenly becomes one of those frameworks that needs 2 years of hard study before you really understand it, then maybe you should be learning some other framework during those 2 years? Because there is also a lot of ugliness and technical debt in WordPress, things that made sense when the focus was "make life easy for designers" but which don't make sense if the goal is "be the best framework." I was around in 2001 when PHP-Nuke decided to go down a similar road. The decision was made that it would be refactored into a series of components, each of which would have an elegant interface for interacting with the other components. PHP-Nuke was going to clean up its technical debt, become more secure, adopt best practices. But previously it had been playing the role of "easiest way to set up a blog or forum". It gave up one role and tried to become something else completely. It self-destructed. Two years later it was dead, no one was using it. It seems to me that WordPress is going down the same road as PHP-Nuke. Obviously WordPress is a much bigger community than PHP-Nuke ever was, but it seems like it is making the same kind of mistake. I thought Matt was extremely wise for sticking with PHP 4 for so long, but Gutenberg seems like the kind of mistake he would have been making if he'd adopted PHP 5 too soon.

ukyrgf 8y ago

I thought this article was pretty insightful, regarding Gutenberg and Automattic's response to the open source community: https://foliovision.com/2018/10/gutenberg-f35-of-cms https://foliovision.com/2018/10/gutenberg-f35-of-cms And since then, these two troubling things have happened: Oct 9, Accessibility team lead resigns over Gutenberg - https://wptavern.com/wordpress-accessibility-team-lead-resigns-cites-political-complications-related-to-gutenberg https://wptavern.com/wordpress-accessibility-team-lead-resig... Oct 17, Accessibility audit canceled, because the new accessibility team lead "didn’t have the authority to authorize it in the first place" - https://wptavern.com/gutenberg-accessibility-audit-postponed-indefinitely https://wptavern.com/gutenberg-accessibility-audit-postponed...

lucideer 8y ago

As someone who has always loathed Wordpress and everything connected to it and its ecosystem, I've switched over a Wordpress install I—reluctantly—voluntarily maintain in my spare time, and been extremely pleasantly surprised. I've worked with Wordpress a lot over the years, so I'm very familiar with its inner workings: this is what's largely motivated me to avoid it when possible, and unfortunately prevented me from contributing to the project. Given my initial reaction to Gutenberg, I'm imagining the community at large will hate it. The Wordpress community is one that champions amateur, dangerous, big-ball-of-mud software development, under the guise of being "beginner friendly" (where "beginner" = "not experienced enough to be leading clients to believe they can provide professional-grade solutions"). This is a mindset that favours hacks and tech debt. over refactoring, and Gutenberg is definitely going to force both plugin and theme developers to rethink, and rewrite their approach (in a positive way, imo). If it successfully brings Wordpress out of the dark-ages, that's great obviously. If it makes Drupal more pleasant and easy-to-use for editors: also nice. If it kills Wordpress due to its community migrating away, then at least it could leave room for some more modern competitor. I just hope the core devs don't do a U-turn on Gutenberg.

scottybowl 8y ago
In a word: ClassicPress.. The community is already migrating
- scarecrowbob 8y ago
  I keep hearing folks say this, but it feels very astroturfed to me... I totally can be wrong about that feeling, but it's my feeling and I own it.
  - shinoda 8y ago
    Ironic you mention the astroturfing, as the person you replied to is the creator of ClassicPress ;) The creator likes to namedrop ClassicPress everywhere on the WP.org forums and WPTavern. He's had his posts removed from the wp.org forums due to spam too.
- 8y ago

coding123 8y ago

This is a step in the right direction. -someone that stopped using WordPress when porn started appearing automatically in random folders because the view tech is php

nqzero 8y ago

anyone have a sense whether this frontend could be decoupled from the php backend ?

phonon 8y ago
Would love to know as well!

pier25 8y ago

I get that Automattic wants to compete with Wix, etc, but throwing the Wordpress community and ecosystem under the bus is not the way to go. Gutenberg has its place in the web dev world of 2018 but it should have been a completely new project instead of a replacement of good old Wordpress.

photomatt 8y ago

Howdy — lead of WordPress here. When the article was written in January of 2018, I would agree Gutenberg wasn't ready for core. Ten months later, it's come a long way. There have been 41 public releases of Gutenberg, and close to 600,000 sites are using it already. It's the mostly widely tested (and adopted) new feature code we've had in any release of WordPress in my memory. It might not be for everyone, which is why we created the Classic Editor plugin which you can install today, and when 5.0 comes out in a few weeks your site will look and work pretty much exactly like it does today, and you can migrate to Gutenberg at your leisure, or perhaps not at all. (There are lots of ways to post and interact with WordPress, including the command line via wp-cli.) A big advantage of blocks is they will allow us to simplify many of the different concepts and interfaces throughout WordPress, including our old WYSIWYG sorta-blocks, shortcodes, widgets, menus, and embeds of all types. It solves literally hundreds of interactions where people used to get stuck in our old WYSIWYG and either switch to code view to fix things, or just give up. Like all software, the 5.0 release of WordPress isn't a finish line, it's a starting one. We are already planning for 5.1 and beyond (including minimum PHP updates) and we look forward to bringing the fast, public iteration cycle that Gutenberg has demonstrated to more parts of core.

laken 8y ago
Hey Matt! I'm not denying the massive amount of testing and effort going into Gutenberg, as I do see it. I am however worried about the new block editor hurting the good reputation WordPress has, particularly in regards to accessibility. Hacker News isn't the right place for this discussion, I know, but I want to get it out there. Accessibility is one of the best features of WordPress, even if most people don't know about it. Keeping the WordPress editor accessible not only helps people with disabilities, as it also aids people who may have a temporary ailment (holding their baby, and just having one hand available, for example), or even "invisible" disabilities such as dyslexia, ADHD, or an Autism Spectrum disorder. The new block editor has made tremendous strides at improving individual component's accessibility recently, and I believe that's where the confusion and miscommunication comes in between all the core teams. Code-wise, the block editor is quite accessible; zoomed out, the editor as a whole isn't. It's a UX issue, more than a development one. It's what happens when the design isn't with accessibility in mind. I don't think it's worth punting release, but I really would like to see more work on documentation and warnings in the core to people who rely on assistive technologies. If you don't know the layout of the block editor and had to navigate it with only a keyboard and no eyesight, it's incredibly confusing! If there was proper documentation, you might be able to explain the layout and mechanics, which would help, though still not solve all the problems. If someone is blind and has a blog, in my experience, 90% of them use WordPress because it's very friendly to them when they want to write. It's not a fair comparison, as TinyMCE merely is a glorified text-field, but that's also one of the old selling points of WordPress -- super simple out of the box. It's my understanding that a lot of the preliminary design for Gutenberg was behind closed doors inside of Automattic, before publicly being brought out to the public and collaboration ensued. I don't believe there is anything wrong with this, as it happens within many FLOSS projects by corporate interests that rely on the platform. I do though wish that in the initial design phase, accessibility was a goal, not an afterthought. It may have been a goal too, not denying that, but there might have been a lack of expertise in regards to how to make interfaces fully accessible. I don't mean to attack the editor, Automattic, or you about this. I know you've heard a lot about it. I love the block editor; it's such a pleasant experience for me to use. I worry that people though who aren't as able-bodied as I won't feel the same though. Finally, I have a hunch that Automattic itself has now found that it needs expertise on Accessibility, which is why there's this: https://automattic.com/work-with-us/product-designer-accessibility/ https://automattic.com/work-with-us/product-designer-accessi... I do believe in WordPress.org, and I love Automattic as a company and their stance in regards to the open web. I like that Automattic is a company built on my personal-favorite legal document, the GNU GPL. I'm looking forward to the day that the block editor is accessible, as it's not now. I do believe it will be. I only wish there was a stronger push before :)

bookofjoe 8y ago

It would appear that I'm the only one reading this who uses TypePad (since 2004). True, it's clunky, unchanging, and very slow — but that translates to ease of use and reliability.

corradomatt 8y ago

The thing that really concerns me with WordPress and Gutenberg is performance. Gutenberg is great but there is never much concern to making the front-end less top heavy. Gutenberg is likely to make this worse. Each block will add it's own CSS and JS...and the bloat will be immense. Instead of users adding a single page builder plugin, they'll add a whole bunch of individual blocks and each one will load more and more external scripts. PageSpeed scores will be dismal.

photomatt 8y ago
Blocks need not do that, and most should be no more overhead than what people were already doing in posts. Perhaps is a big focus though, but one that's been easier to address outside of core with things like expanded CDN support in the latest version of Jetpack Photon.