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No, again from experience—updating WordPress to the version required for Gutenberg would break the sites. It's not just a matter of preferring a plugin. It's a
by 52-6F-62 6y ago
No, again from experience—updating WordPress to the version required for Gutenberg would break the sites. It's not just a matter of preferring a plugin. It's a matter of the plugin being essential, or quite literally wound into the architecture of the site.
You have to realize that a lot of sites relying on WordPress have been in production for close to 20 years. I've worked close to such sites. Any major version changes would break them. And the kinds of organizations that tend to rely on WordPress for their editorial don't always have capital to expend on the top-bottom rebuild that would be required to separate them from their legacy architectures including those incompatible plugins.
I've had the task of importing legacy data (over 15 years worth) into new WP sites, and it is not trivial when the site has used plugins to do any kind of transforms on the data, custom field re-mappings, tag/category mappings, and any other content munging. Especially when one plugin goes out of date and a new one is pulled to replace it. Then you're left with multiple versions of each of those situations, while other plugins become the base for any other number of plugins.
I'm starting to digress, but point being that in many cases it's not simply a choice of one editor over another, but a practical inability (technologically, financially, or otherwise) to adopt the new editor because of the nature of legacy WP and plugin architecture.
- marc_io 6y agoUpdating to a major version is not mandatory, as they support older versions as early as 3.7. The real problem is the plugin ecosystem, which does not do the same.
- 52-6F-62 6y agoThis is true, and a major reason those sites still function as-is, and continue to use WordPress.
- forgotmypw17 6y agoI operated a site like this, minus the WordPress. Then PHP changed something and it broke. I now design in such a way that PHP is not required component.
- 52-6F-62 6y agoTo your point, it's definitely not just a WordPress issue for sure. The WP ecosystem just enabled that kind of development and architecture over time, even if it was not advisable. C'est la vie, and all that.