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For all the criticism the Gutenberg Block Editor gets, it was a necessary move for Automattic. They were one step away from being ousted from their own CMS by t
by easyThrowaway 3y ago
For all the criticism the Gutenberg Block Editor gets, it was a necessary move for Automattic. They were one step away from being ousted from their own CMS by the likes of WPBakery, Visual Composer and Elementor. If your CMS becomes just a glorifed container for third-party solutions, it's just a small jump from there to having your users move to a completely different backend built by the aforementioned authors.
I still don't get why did they had to reach for such a needlessly complex solution. A few weeks ago I tried building a small project for a client by writing bespoke blocks for custom logic and storing.
I found it was waaay easier and even waaay quicker to learn laravel to scratch than try to wrap my brain around the weird custom superstructure they built around React, their suggested approach on how you should write a version of each block for previewing, another for editing, some glue code between those that is not extremely clear how you should be interfacing, etc. Their developer guide is the equivalent of the "Draw the fucking owl" tutorial.
Even looking for exisiting examples, every one of the default wordpress blocks does things their own way, the whole thing felt over-engineered and extremely brittle.
- askonomm 3y agoYup, fully agree. Thankfully for most of my client work I don't need WordPress theme-ing at all, so I have a custom plugin that disables that, and instead allows me to integrate into WP (so that I get all the WP core PHP functions as well) a PHP framework installation (for example Laravel) where I do all my data-and-front-end wrangling instead. It also supports replacing the front-end with a custom React app, if I wanted that, leaving WP as just the API and admin panel. And as for letting customers edit custom data structures, I still roll with Advanced Custom Fields plugin for that, because it's 100x faster than making the equivalent functionality for the block editor. I do hope they simplify that API at one point though.
- easyThrowaway 3y agoHonestly I wish they just offered an officially supported framework-agnostic headless solution on par with Block Themes. I was kinda hopeful when Automattic bought Frontify[1] some time ago, but for some reason apparently that went nowhere. [1]https://frontity.org https://frontity.org
- pupppet 3y agoA drag-and-drop page builder was the right move, except Gutenberg didn’t take any cues from what was already out there. They didn’t reuse any ideas from existing builders which were already in their second or third generation, and instead went out on their own and built UI trash.
- karmakaze 3y ago> a glorifed container for third-party solutions, it's just a small jump... This is the open question. I myself have wondered why WordPress still hasn't been replaced in any substantial way.