4 ms·

It's a shame they have gone off the rails so badly with Gutenberg.

by skmurphy 3y ago

paulryanrogers 3y ago
Despite my distaste for Gutenberg, I don't think WP would have continued growing without a built-in WYSIWYG solution.
- skmurphy 3y ago
  Reasonable men may differ.
- 0xblinq 3y ago
  It depends who you're targeting. If you want any non-developer to be able to edit the site, it's great. For developers, it's just plain terrible.
WillPostForFood 3y ago
Gutenberg is great! And if you don't like it you can still use the classic editor. And if you kinda like it, you can use Gutenberg (block editor) with classic editor blocks.
- skmurphy 3y ago
  This is less and less true.
notatoad 3y ago
as somebody who only really started using wordpress post-gutenberg, i don't see the problem. it works, it seems easy enough to use, and my non-technical colleagues who are more used to making facebook posts than websites love it. and that was the whole reason i started using wordpress in the first place: so i wouldn't have to maintain content editors for my colleagues. is the problem just that it's different to the way it used to be?
- joshspankit 3y ago
  Basically, yes. Gutenberg was designed for people like you who (were/are) new to WordPress and there was a rocky transition as well as a complete reworking of how to build WP themes (almost everyone’s bread and butter work).
- nyanpasu64 3y ago
  Around 2 years ago I was trying to move my blog to Wordpress. I found that the vast majority of themes want your money (unlike static site generators like Jekyll, Zola, and probably Hugo), I found numerous editing and cursor movement bugs in the Gutenberg editor (https://github.com/WordPress/gutenberg/issues?q=is%3Aissue+sort%3Aupdated-desc+author%3Anyanpasu64 https://github.com/WordPress/gutenberg/issues?q=is%3Aissue+s...), I was unable to edit pre code blocks on the mobile app, and converting articles between Gutenberg and classic formats resulted in structural issues (someone else has elaborated on the technical reasons at https://gschoppe.com/wordpress/comments-arent-structure/ https://gschoppe.com/wordpress/comments-arent-structure/).
  - chrismorgan 3y ago
    I migrated a business’s site from WordPress last year (a site that had been around since only 2018, I believe). I was surprised to discover how awful all this stuff was in WordPress’s export (… which was also very misleading and limited in scope). In order to not ruin large amounts of content, I had to dismantle that Gutenberg comment stuff (where present) with its strange mixture of structure and presentation, and also port the old-style wpautop function, which is obviously a total disaster of a concept that has arisen from bad technical decisions being made at several points in its history, combined with caring about backwards compatibility in mildly weird ways. The fact that it didn’t even identify what was Gutenbergy and what wasn’t, but basically just treated the whole thing as a string from which you parsed what you could and shrugged your shoulders about the rest was severely off-putting.
stove 3y ago
The alternative to Gutenberg was allowing thousands of proprietary plugin developers to compete with each other to encode your data in a way that made it impossible to migrate to anything else. Gutenberg was mandatory.
- skmurphy 3y ago
  Gutenberg encodes semantics in comments and inhibits migration and interoperability as much as any of the other proprietary plugins you are complaining about.
  - stove 3y ago
    Gutenberg is first party. It's either WP or a 3rd party, I know who I would pick.
    - skmurphy 3y ago
      I think that is normally a good rule of thumb, especially when first party has a track record of accomplishment. It's one that I embrace. I am trying to stick with the original editor and find it increasingly hard as all of the design elements are now requiring Gutenberg. To be clear, I am not advocating for another page builder over Gutenberg, just not embracing Gutenberg because it embeds semantic elements in comments and if and when I need to migrate off of WordPress I don't want to be stuck. I have been using WordPress for 18 years, which is a long time for any technology platform. I don't have plans to migrate but I don't want to foreclose any options.
thundermuffin 3y ago
Even all these years later, I cannot wrap my head around WP's direction with Gutenberg. I think having a first party solution for WYSIWYG editing experience is important for WP going forward to keep folks (read: clients, bloggers, etc) interested in it, and I would much prefer to rely on core functionality than battling Elementor, Divi, Beaver Builder, and etc. However, I have a list of a few items that just haven't sat right with me during the post-Gutenberg WordPress world. 1. The way that it saves the HTML output from React blocks directly to the DB is a cumbersome and unfriendly approach for all. Having a client ask for what would have been a simple tweak pre-Gutenberg and having to resave every page on the site so the deprecation pathway can "update" the block is not friendly to developers or editors. I know you can use PHP (aka "dynamic") blocks, but then you're duplicating the same exact UI between React and PHP and have to take on the technical debt to make sure to keep that in sync. We've moved to relying on ACF Blocks instead of React blocks for most things due to it having a better developer experience and a lot of our clients being used to how ACF works, but obviously this comes at the expense of the fancy inline editing that was the whole "wow!" factor of Gutenberg. 2. The documentation was lacking at launch, and it still feels that way sometimes. It was really aggravating to try to figure out what exactly you could change and remove in core blocks. I remember a coworker and I trying to reverse engineer their columns block since there were a lot of missing features we wanted and realizing that a very, very core block to the Gutenberg experience was utilizing functions marked as experimental without much documentation about what they were or why they were experimental (that we could find). I remember doing our usual upgrade on a new version year after we finally built our own version based off theirs, and the editor completely broke in one of the upgrades (can't remember if it was a major or minor release). Turns out those imports weren't experimental anymore (and no hard feelings on us having to update our imports. We knew we'd need to, it was just the length of time that passed that was "scary", because it doesn't feel great that the core backbone of your site is experimental, haha!). 3. Full site editing being rolled out has felt like Gutenberg's launch all over again. I think #2 is partially responsible for this, but I've watched coworkers have to fight with this a ton for very little benefit, and in some cases those folks end up just saying "hey, you know what instead of trying to rely on their new/weird templates, we'll just add header/footer.php back." This may be less of a problem of Gutenberg itself, but more just a continuation of the lack of decision making and planning that lead to Gutenberg's flaky launch to begin with. Like Gutenberg itself, it's a good idea, but launching it half-baked to just get it out the door makes me hesitate to want to incorporate it until years have passed. My experience has been somewhat limited with their FSE implementation since I've been doing a lot of NextJS work lately, but what little I've dabbled in it wasn't going to have me giving them glowing reviews. 4. It feels like they reinvented the wheel to "do" React SSR in PHP since they save React output directly to the DB. Sometimes I wonder if they wanted to actually have Gutenberg be a standalone project, move to Node, and do real server side rendered React, but were afraid of the very real pushback a move like that would cause and the loss of decades of plugins and backwards compatibility. I know we're toying around with the idea of headless WP + Next since it would hopefully get around the poor pathway for updating React components, but at that point we wonder is WP really what we want to go with or would another CMS be better for our needs. All that said (didn't mean to rant so much!), I agree with what lenova said a few comments over that Matt has always appeared like a decent person from afar, and I've always respected that he's a web titan (in my eyes, at least), but doesn't come across with the same high and mighty attitude and harshness that a lot of other folks in a position of status like his do.
scruffyherder 3y ago
It almost never renders on my iphone correctly. I can't make updates or changes on the road.
Buchstabensalat 3y ago
It really is. Elementor has been the de-facto page builder for WordPress for quite some time now - and it is excellent. Gutenberg doesn't even allow you to specify a different style for mobile for a block.

It's a shame they have gone off the rails so badly with Gutenberg.

paulryanrogers 3y ago

Despite my distaste for Gutenberg, I don't think WP would have continued growing without a built-in WYSIWYG solution.

skmurphy 3y ago
Reasonable men may differ.
0xblinq 3y ago
It depends who you're targeting. If you want any non-developer to be able to edit the site, it's great. For developers, it's just plain terrible.

WillPostForFood 3y ago

Gutenberg is great! And if you don't like it you can still use the classic editor. And if you kinda like it, you can use Gutenberg (block editor) with classic editor blocks.

skmurphy 3y ago
This is less and less true.

notatoad 3y ago

as somebody who only really started using wordpress post-gutenberg, i don't see the problem. it works, it seems easy enough to use, and my non-technical colleagues who are more used to making facebook posts than websites love it. and that was the whole reason i started using wordpress in the first place: so i wouldn't have to maintain content editors for my colleagues. is the problem just that it's different to the way it used to be?

joshspankit 3y ago
Basically, yes. Gutenberg was designed for people like you who (were/are) new to WordPress and there was a rocky transition as well as a complete reworking of how to build WP themes (almost everyone’s bread and butter work).
nyanpasu64 3y ago
Around 2 years ago I was trying to move my blog to Wordpress. I found that the vast majority of themes want your money (unlike static site generators like Jekyll, Zola, and probably Hugo), I found numerous editing and cursor movement bugs in the Gutenberg editor (https://github.com/WordPress/gutenberg/issues?q=is%3Aissue+sort%3Aupdated-desc+author%3Anyanpasu64 https://github.com/WordPress/gutenberg/issues?q=is%3Aissue+s...), I was unable to edit pre code blocks on the mobile app, and converting articles between Gutenberg and classic formats resulted in structural issues (someone else has elaborated on the technical reasons at https://gschoppe.com/wordpress/comments-arent-structure/ https://gschoppe.com/wordpress/comments-arent-structure/).
- chrismorgan 3y ago
  I migrated a business’s site from WordPress last year (a site that had been around since only 2018, I believe). I was surprised to discover how awful all this stuff was in WordPress’s export (… which was also very misleading and limited in scope). In order to not ruin large amounts of content, I had to dismantle that Gutenberg comment stuff (where present) with its strange mixture of structure and presentation, and also port the old-style wpautop function, which is obviously a total disaster of a concept that has arisen from bad technical decisions being made at several points in its history, combined with caring about backwards compatibility in mildly weird ways. The fact that it didn’t even identify what was Gutenbergy and what wasn’t, but basically just treated the whole thing as a string from which you parsed what you could and shrugged your shoulders about the rest was severely off-putting.

stove 3y ago

The alternative to Gutenberg was allowing thousands of proprietary plugin developers to compete with each other to encode your data in a way that made it impossible to migrate to anything else. Gutenberg was mandatory.

skmurphy 3y ago
Gutenberg encodes semantics in comments and inhibits migration and interoperability as much as any of the other proprietary plugins you are complaining about.
- stove 3y ago
  Gutenberg is first party. It's either WP or a 3rd party, I know who I would pick.
  - skmurphy 3y ago
    I think that is normally a good rule of thumb, especially when first party has a track record of accomplishment. It's one that I embrace. I am trying to stick with the original editor and find it increasingly hard as all of the design elements are now requiring Gutenberg. To be clear, I am not advocating for another page builder over Gutenberg, just not embracing Gutenberg because it embeds semantic elements in comments and if and when I need to migrate off of WordPress I don't want to be stuck. I have been using WordPress for 18 years, which is a long time for any technology platform. I don't have plans to migrate but I don't want to foreclose any options.

thundermuffin 3y ago

Even all these years later, I cannot wrap my head around WP's direction with Gutenberg. I think having a first party solution for WYSIWYG editing experience is important for WP going forward to keep folks (read: clients, bloggers, etc) interested in it, and I would much prefer to rely on core functionality than battling Elementor, Divi, Beaver Builder, and etc. However, I have a list of a few items that just haven't sat right with me during the post-Gutenberg WordPress world. 1. The way that it saves the HTML output from React blocks directly to the DB is a cumbersome and unfriendly approach for all. Having a client ask for what would have been a simple tweak pre-Gutenberg and having to resave every page on the site so the deprecation pathway can "update" the block is not friendly to developers or editors. I know you can use PHP (aka "dynamic") blocks, but then you're duplicating the same exact UI between React and PHP and have to take on the technical debt to make sure to keep that in sync. We've moved to relying on ACF Blocks instead of React blocks for most things due to it having a better developer experience and a lot of our clients being used to how ACF works, but obviously this comes at the expense of the fancy inline editing that was the whole "wow!" factor of Gutenberg. 2. The documentation was lacking at launch, and it still feels that way sometimes. It was really aggravating to try to figure out what exactly you could change and remove in core blocks. I remember a coworker and I trying to reverse engineer their columns block since there were a lot of missing features we wanted and realizing that a very, very core block to the Gutenberg experience was utilizing functions marked as experimental without much documentation about what they were or why they were experimental (that we could find). I remember doing our usual upgrade on a new version year after we finally built our own version based off theirs, and the editor completely broke in one of the upgrades (can't remember if it was a major or minor release). Turns out those imports weren't experimental anymore (and no hard feelings on us having to update our imports. We knew we'd need to, it was just the length of time that passed that was "scary", because it doesn't feel great that the core backbone of your site is experimental, haha!). 3. Full site editing being rolled out has felt like Gutenberg's launch all over again. I think #2 is partially responsible for this, but I've watched coworkers have to fight with this a ton for very little benefit, and in some cases those folks end up just saying "hey, you know what instead of trying to rely on their new/weird templates, we'll just add header/footer.php back." This may be less of a problem of Gutenberg itself, but more just a continuation of the lack of decision making and planning that lead to Gutenberg's flaky launch to begin with. Like Gutenberg itself, it's a good idea, but launching it half-baked to just get it out the door makes me hesitate to want to incorporate it until years have passed. My experience has been somewhat limited with their FSE implementation since I've been doing a lot of NextJS work lately, but what little I've dabbled in it wasn't going to have me giving them glowing reviews. 4. It feels like they reinvented the wheel to "do" React SSR in PHP since they save React output directly to the DB. Sometimes I wonder if they wanted to actually have Gutenberg be a standalone project, move to Node, and do real server side rendered React, but were afraid of the very real pushback a move like that would cause and the loss of decades of plugins and backwards compatibility. I know we're toying around with the idea of headless WP + Next since it would hopefully get around the poor pathway for updating React components, but at that point we wonder is WP really what we want to go with or would another CMS be better for our needs. All that said (didn't mean to rant so much!), I agree with what lenova said a few comments over that Matt has always appeared like a decent person from afar, and I've always respected that he's a web titan (in my eyes, at least), but doesn't come across with the same high and mighty attitude and harshness that a lot of other folks in a position of status like his do.

scruffyherder 3y ago

It almost never renders on my iphone correctly. I can't make updates or changes on the road.

Buchstabensalat 3y ago

It really is. Elementor has been the de-facto page builder for WordPress for quite some time now - and it is excellent. Gutenberg doesn't even allow you to specify a different style for mobile for a block.