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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

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
I think the oddest part of Automattic's handling of this is that they are ramming this through, skirting a lot of quality controls such as accessibility (something they recently canned to meet deadline) but yet have the minimum requirement for Wordpress on very much dead PHP versions, 5.2-5.4. They also claim to be community driven, yet...they aren't even listening to the community on this. It's wild. I guess maybe their overall goal is to make Wordpress.com a highly successful SaaS and the open source portion is a secondary thought because it isn't profit driven. In any case, this could turn out to be a massive disaster for Wordpress. As a long time Wordpress developer, I am highly concerned. I think it has tons of potential if one right...but the handling of it has been shady, at best.
- Topgamer7 8y ago
  People don't like change. If you think you have a good idea, and you want to incorporate it into a product, you'll often find push back. Especially in the case that it has widespread affects. If you nail it you will hear all sorts of praise, if you fail - ridicule and insults. They are trying to push forward with what they think is a good idea, and best for the products future. Doesn't mean they're right, however there is the argument that the customer doesn't know their experience could be improved. Time will tell in the WordPress case.
  - zaphar 8y ago
    None of which has anything to do with having a double standard. If you ran your project with backwards compatibility as a core value and promise to your users then don't be surprised if they get upset when you break that promise. It can be good to recognize that back-compat has become detrimental. When that happens, you need to communicate the reasons why you have decided to break it and communicate that the projects values have changed going forward. It doesn't sound like either of those things have happened here.
    - photomatt 8y ago
      Please check out my "State of the Word" presentation from 2016 and 2017, I tried to make the best case I could for why, perhaps once a decade, it is worthwhile to trade backwards compatibility for future relevancy. The reason I have personally not advocated for that trade-off before was that the reward on the other side was not worth it, but with Gutenberg we have a huge opportunity, and incredible user demand demonstrated by the adoption of the beta plugin, that I think makes it #worthit.

partiallypro 8y ago

I think the oddest part of Automattic's handling of this is that they are ramming this through, skirting a lot of quality controls such as accessibility (something they recently canned to meet deadline) but yet have the minimum requirement for Wordpress on very much dead PHP versions, 5.2-5.4. They also claim to be community driven, yet...they aren't even listening to the community on this. It's wild. I guess maybe their overall goal is to make Wordpress.com a highly successful SaaS and the open source portion is a secondary thought because it isn't profit driven. In any case, this could turn out to be a massive disaster for Wordpress. As a long time Wordpress developer, I am highly concerned. I think it has tons of potential if one right...but the handling of it has been shady, at best.

Topgamer7 8y ago
People don't like change. If you think you have a good idea, and you want to incorporate it into a product, you'll often find push back. Especially in the case that it has widespread affects. If you nail it you will hear all sorts of praise, if you fail - ridicule and insults. They are trying to push forward with what they think is a good idea, and best for the products future. Doesn't mean they're right, however there is the argument that the customer doesn't know their experience could be improved. Time will tell in the WordPress case.
- zaphar 8y ago
  None of which has anything to do with having a double standard. If you ran your project with backwards compatibility as a core value and promise to your users then don't be surprised if they get upset when you break that promise. It can be good to recognize that back-compat has become detrimental. When that happens, you need to communicate the reasons why you have decided to break it and communicate that the projects values have changed going forward. It doesn't sound like either of those things have happened here.
  - photomatt 8y ago
    Please check out my "State of the Word" presentation from 2016 and 2017, I tried to make the best case I could for why, perhaps once a decade, it is worthwhile to trade backwards compatibility for future relevancy. The reason I have personally not advocated for that trade-off before was that the reward on the other side was not worth it, but with Gutenberg we have a huge opportunity, and incredible user demand demonstrated by the adoption of the beta plugin, that I think makes it #worthit.