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I'm technical director of an agency that builds websites solely in WordPress, and I can say with feeling that Gutenberg has (so far) been a disaster not just in

I'm technical director of an agency that builds websites solely in WordPress, and I can say with feeling that Gutenberg has (so far) been a disaster not just in terms of accessibility but in terms of clarity of the development process. It's been a moving target since day one, with us constantly scrambling to keep up with large changes in each release. We held off for a while, and have only built three sites with it, but I wish we'd held off longer. For example, there have been major interfaces changes on a regular basis, each of which we have to spend time walking our clients through. One change - defaulting to full-screen editing, which hides the menus and loses a lot of context that editors were used to - was pushed through at the last minute of a release cycle with a personal intervention from Matt Mullenweg. That meant that suddenly editors were confronted with an unfamiliar editing interface even if they were already registered and hadn't changed anything themselves, rather than a dismissible tooltip letting existing editors know that they could use a new full-screen editing interface. That seemingly arbitrary and personal style of project management really doesn't foster confidence that things are being thought through carefully. I know from personal experience that you need to keep up momentum in a development project otherwise things stagnate, but so far the development of Gutenberg has been very much "move fast and break things" which would feel appropriate for a beta, but not for the default editing experience. I think Gutenberg may well turn out to be really good - our clients do prefer it over the classic editor once we have it under control - but the way this has been managed has lost a lot of good will on our part as an agency and I've been actively looking at other CMSes like Craft as a result.

chiefalchemist 6y ago
Gutenberg shipped way too soon. It has been a textbook case of how not to launch a product. Solid idea...horrendous execution. Mullenweg owes the WP community a massive apology. He especially owes the #a11y Community an apology. Hint: In either case don't hold your breath. But more importantly, it should not be in core. Full stop. Once WP became REST-driven the push should have been to lighten core. That is to decouple as muxh as possible. Core is that _core_. Then you configure your needs from there. Core should be the basics, as light and as lean as possible. But instead, more and more unnecessary bloat. More and more features with less and less benefit. Yes, I'm looking at CraftCMS and others as well. WP has jumped the shark. It's not going away. But I'm tired of having to shower after everytime I work with it.
- rado 6y ago
  Meanwhile, the core lacks: multilingual, CDN support, caching. Essentials.
  - LordAtlas 6y ago
    Even something basic like a way to categorise and manage your media library is missing without freakin' plugins.
  - mtberatwork 6y ago
    CDN support out of the box isn't essential, most sites will never achieve the kind of traffic that merits a CDN. However, to add to your list: database migrations, task queues, middleware, form validation, templating, dependency management, unified plugin framework, etc. No lack of callback soup though.
  - chiefalchemist 6y ago
    Those don't belong in core either. Core should focus strictly on the being a rock solid foundation. Plugins are there to supplement that. That's the beauty of the architecture. Or at least, is supposed to be. WordPress should not have the same mindset as Jetpack. Oops? Did I just say that?? ;)
    - rado 6y ago
      WP is useless without CDN and caching.
      - chiefalchemist 6y ago
        It depends on how you're using it. It depends on the resources you have for such things. WP can and will work without them.
- rmccue 6y ago
  WordPress has never internalised the ideas of API-first development or the ability to have a lightweight core, and to this day it’s still treated as an addon piece that could someday be removed. (Source: I wrote the REST API in WordPress and lead the API team for many years.)
dubcanada 6y ago
I'm obviously in my own bubble, but I don't understand people complaining about WordPress. WordPress is by far the worst CMS you could possibly use, every other single CMS is better in every capacity. Let's go through why - Uses PHP 5 spaghetti code with a handful of garbage event listeners and output buffering - Has no integration with composer at all - Doesn't have any form of content types without plugins - Has no cache, no theming engine, no multi-language, etc etc - Beyond a media library it has literally no aspects of a "content management system" It's built for a simple blogging platform and for that purpose Gutenberg is amazing. Why do people continue to try and shove weirdly hacked on garbage plugins on top of basically a glorified blogging platform is beyond me.
- katzgrau 6y ago
  Like PHP in general, it was easy to get started with and now there are tons of developers pushing it in the ecosystem. Now that so many people know it, it's self-perpetuating at this point.
- conatus 6y ago
  Most of this plain isn't true - afraid it does feel very much like a bubble there! > - Uses PHP 5 spaghetti code with a handful of garbage event listeners and output buffering I mean it has listeners for almost every event you might want to interupt and trigger something on that are well documented and have been for decades. The PHP 5 code is very much legacy so I will grant you this. > - Has no integration with composer at all Composer support is absolutely fine and there are well maintained ways of keeping plugins and themes under Composer and have been for many years. > - Doesn't have any form of content types without plugins Yes, but adding further content types at the level of code or these plugins is easy, trivially so. > - Has no cache, no theming engine, no multi-language, etc etc It has several caches that are very powerful indeed, including those included by default. PHP is a theming engine. Internationalisation built into the core, I'll grant the multi-language support is not as good as it might be. Could be better. > - Beyond a media library it has literally no aspects of a "content management system" I mean, people use it to run newspapers, so not sure if this is true. It depends what you need. The organisations behind WordPress decided to meet their user need and provide a really good, well understood platform for content management with an extensively tested UX experience of end users. They prioritised this over developer niceities. If the purpose of software is to augment human capacity and be genuinely useful, this was the right decision. The rough edges from a developer experience perspective have been largely smoothed off by a well established ecosystem like Roots.
interestica 6y ago
I think the "hard and fast" mode is also making it hard for plugin developers to keep up. Two weeks ago, a conflict was pushing changes to a live site on preview. (Which is absolutely insane to me - I suspect there are users who unknowingly published changes to a live site) https://www.advancedcustomfields.com/blog/acf-5-9-1-release/ https://www.advancedcustomfields.com/blog/acf-5-9-1-release/ > " Fixed validation bugs One of the major improvements shipped in version 5.9 (PHP validation for the Gutenberg editor) was found to accidentally publish changes when previewing a post. The same bug was also responsible for preventing the Beaver Builder plugin from launching its custom editor – sorry. This bug is now fixed, and previewing content will now work as expected."
- LordAtlas 6y ago
  Well, I'll chime in with a weird bug that was supposedly gone from previous versions but came back in WP 5.4 Gutenberg. You know those side panels where you can change values for blocks like padding, etc.? Well, every time I started typing in a value, the input field would lose focus. So if I wanted to enter 100 as a value for height in pixels, I would need to enter 1, click back in the field, enter 0, click back in the field, enter 0 again. Or type it in a text edit and copy-paste. Googling told me it was a bug that had crept back: https://github.com/WordPress/gutenberg/issues/20950 https://github.com/WordPress/gutenberg/issues/20950 It was fixed again in WP 5.5, but it was agonising working on layouts before that.
tripleplay 6y ago
> major interfaces changes on a regular basis, each of which we have to spend time walking our clients through I worked in web development ~15 years ago. As part of my job, I was tasked with another developer to transition a major client from a 4D system to PHP/MySQL. The other developer was keen to change how the admin interface worked. The client was keen to keep it the same for this very exact reason. They did not want to have to spend the time re-training their rather sizable staff. The other developer won the argument with the boss. The new interface went in. The client eventually dumped the company. That's a lesson I've never forgotten, and it seems like a lesson too many technical people don't understand. I knew the same thing would happen when they pushed Gutenberg. I'm convinced it was never about improving WordPress. It was about competing, via WordPress.com, with Square, Wix, and others.

chiefalchemist 6y ago

Gutenberg shipped way too soon. It has been a textbook case of how not to launch a product. Solid idea...horrendous execution. Mullenweg owes the WP community a massive apology. He especially owes the #a11y Community an apology. Hint: In either case don't hold your breath. But more importantly, it should not be in core. Full stop. Once WP became REST-driven the push should have been to lighten core. That is to decouple as muxh as possible. Core is that _core_. Then you configure your needs from there. Core should be the basics, as light and as lean as possible. But instead, more and more unnecessary bloat. More and more features with less and less benefit. Yes, I'm looking at CraftCMS and others as well. WP has jumped the shark. It's not going away. But I'm tired of having to shower after everytime I work with it.

rado 6y ago
Meanwhile, the core lacks: multilingual, CDN support, caching. Essentials.
- LordAtlas 6y ago
  Even something basic like a way to categorise and manage your media library is missing without freakin' plugins.
- mtberatwork 6y ago
  CDN support out of the box isn't essential, most sites will never achieve the kind of traffic that merits a CDN. However, to add to your list: database migrations, task queues, middleware, form validation, templating, dependency management, unified plugin framework, etc. No lack of callback soup though.
- chiefalchemist 6y ago
  Those don't belong in core either. Core should focus strictly on the being a rock solid foundation. Plugins are there to supplement that. That's the beauty of the architecture. Or at least, is supposed to be. WordPress should not have the same mindset as Jetpack. Oops? Did I just say that?? ;)
  - rado 6y ago
    WP is useless without CDN and caching.
    - chiefalchemist 6y ago
      It depends on how you're using it. It depends on the resources you have for such things. WP can and will work without them.
rmccue 6y ago
WordPress has never internalised the ideas of API-first development or the ability to have a lightweight core, and to this day it’s still treated as an addon piece that could someday be removed. (Source: I wrote the REST API in WordPress and lead the API team for many years.)

dubcanada 6y ago

I'm obviously in my own bubble, but I don't understand people complaining about WordPress. WordPress is by far the worst CMS you could possibly use, every other single CMS is better in every capacity. Let's go through why - Uses PHP 5 spaghetti code with a handful of garbage event listeners and output buffering - Has no integration with composer at all - Doesn't have any form of content types without plugins - Has no cache, no theming engine, no multi-language, etc etc - Beyond a media library it has literally no aspects of a "content management system" It's built for a simple blogging platform and for that purpose Gutenberg is amazing. Why do people continue to try and shove weirdly hacked on garbage plugins on top of basically a glorified blogging platform is beyond me.

katzgrau 6y ago
Like PHP in general, it was easy to get started with and now there are tons of developers pushing it in the ecosystem. Now that so many people know it, it's self-perpetuating at this point.
conatus 6y ago
Most of this plain isn't true - afraid it does feel very much like a bubble there! > - Uses PHP 5 spaghetti code with a handful of garbage event listeners and output buffering I mean it has listeners for almost every event you might want to interupt and trigger something on that are well documented and have been for decades. The PHP 5 code is very much legacy so I will grant you this. > - Has no integration with composer at all Composer support is absolutely fine and there are well maintained ways of keeping plugins and themes under Composer and have been for many years. > - Doesn't have any form of content types without plugins Yes, but adding further content types at the level of code or these plugins is easy, trivially so. > - Has no cache, no theming engine, no multi-language, etc etc It has several caches that are very powerful indeed, including those included by default. PHP is a theming engine. Internationalisation built into the core, I'll grant the multi-language support is not as good as it might be. Could be better. > - Beyond a media library it has literally no aspects of a "content management system" I mean, people use it to run newspapers, so not sure if this is true. It depends what you need. The organisations behind WordPress decided to meet their user need and provide a really good, well understood platform for content management with an extensively tested UX experience of end users. They prioritised this over developer niceities. If the purpose of software is to augment human capacity and be genuinely useful, this was the right decision. The rough edges from a developer experience perspective have been largely smoothed off by a well established ecosystem like Roots.

interestica 6y ago

I think the "hard and fast" mode is also making it hard for plugin developers to keep up. Two weeks ago, a conflict was pushing changes to a live site on preview. (Which is absolutely insane to me - I suspect there are users who unknowingly published changes to a live site) https://www.advancedcustomfields.com/blog/acf-5-9-1-release/ https://www.advancedcustomfields.com/blog/acf-5-9-1-release/ > " Fixed validation bugs One of the major improvements shipped in version 5.9 (PHP validation for the Gutenberg editor) was found to accidentally publish changes when previewing a post. The same bug was also responsible for preventing the Beaver Builder plugin from launching its custom editor – sorry. This bug is now fixed, and previewing content will now work as expected."

LordAtlas 6y ago
Well, I'll chime in with a weird bug that was supposedly gone from previous versions but came back in WP 5.4 Gutenberg. You know those side panels where you can change values for blocks like padding, etc.? Well, every time I started typing in a value, the input field would lose focus. So if I wanted to enter 100 as a value for height in pixels, I would need to enter 1, click back in the field, enter 0, click back in the field, enter 0 again. Or type it in a text edit and copy-paste. Googling told me it was a bug that had crept back: https://github.com/WordPress/gutenberg/issues/20950 https://github.com/WordPress/gutenberg/issues/20950 It was fixed again in WP 5.5, but it was agonising working on layouts before that.

tripleplay 6y ago

> major interfaces changes on a regular basis, each of which we have to spend time walking our clients through I worked in web development ~15 years ago. As part of my job, I was tasked with another developer to transition a major client from a 4D system to PHP/MySQL. The other developer was keen to change how the admin interface worked. The client was keen to keep it the same for this very exact reason. They did not want to have to spend the time re-training their rather sizable staff. The other developer won the argument with the boss. The new interface went in. The client eventually dumped the company. That's a lesson I've never forgotten, and it seems like a lesson too many technical people don't understand. I knew the same thing would happen when they pushed Gutenberg. I'm convinced it was never about improving WordPress. It was about competing, via WordPress.com, with Square, Wix, and others.