
Is Gutenberg the End or a New Beginning for WordPress? - smacktoward
https://deliciousbrains.com/wordpress-gutenberg/
======
smacktoward
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
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.

~~~
photomatt
Accessibility has been worked on since the beginning of Gutenberg. If
"Automattic" just wanted to be more competitive or operate for its own
commercial benefit, it would have been 10x easier and faster to just do
Gutenberg on WordPress.com and not do it core-first. Gutenberg being in core
means every WordPress host in the world (that all compete with Automattic)
will get access to it. It's not proprietary, it's open source. It works with
all the plugins and themes out there. It works with the hundreds of billions
of posts that have been written in the past 15 years of WordPress. It's
community-first.

~~~
partiallypro
That's just false. Just because it's open source doesn't mean Automattic
doesn't want to turn into a SqaureSpace model. There is no doubt in my mind
that the pivot and ramming through of Gutenberg is because they are scared of
things like SquareSpace and feel they need to evolve fast. They do need to
evolve, but they also need to stop cutting corners and listen to the
community...It won't be long (it might already be true) that the "Classic
Editor" plugin will have more active installs than any other plugin in the
repo. That's a LOUD message from the community that "this is not ready!" I
have sites that are Gutenberg compatible but I still have the classic editor
on, because it's a giant mess.

Gutenberg from my experience is a server hog compared to the classical
Wordpress. It's harder on database servers and on memory. Yet they won't even
change their PHP practices to make it 7+ requirement.

~~~
photomatt
There's also facts: Gutenberg plugin adoption is growing faster than Classic
Editor adoption, so it's not likely it will have more active installs than any
other plugin. But even if it did, that's okay, we're supporting it. It's not a
failing of Gutenberg, just showing that people for whatever reason don't want
change.

AFAIK there is no change to database or memory usage post-Gutenberg,
especially since pretty much all of the new code executes on the client side
when you edit a post. It may use more memory in your browser, but not anything
that should cause issues.

------
lucideer
As someone who has always loathed Wordpress and everything connected to it and
its ecosystem, I've switched over a Wordpress install
I—reluctantly—voluntarily maintain in my spare time, and been extremely
pleasantly surprised.

I've worked with Wordpress a lot over the years, so I'm very familiar with its
inner workings: this is what's largely motivated me to avoid it when possible,
and unfortunately prevented me from contributing to the project.

Given my initial reaction to Gutenberg, I'm imagining the community at large
will hate it. The Wordpress community is one that champions amateur,
dangerous, big-ball-of-mud software development, under the guise of being
"beginner friendly" (where "beginner" = "not experienced enough to be leading
clients to believe they can provide professional-grade solutions"). This is a
mindset that favours hacks and tech debt. over refactoring, and Gutenberg is
definitely going to force both plugin and theme developers to rethink, and
rewrite their approach (in a positive way, imo).

If it successfully brings Wordpress out of the dark-ages, that's great
obviously. If it makes Drupal more pleasant and easy-to-use for editors: also
nice. If it kills Wordpress due to its community migrating away, then at least
it could leave room for some more modern competitor.

I just hope the core devs don't do a U-turn on Gutenberg.

~~~
scottybowl
In a word: ClassicPress.. The community is already migrating

~~~
scarecrowbob
I keep hearing folks say this, but it feels very astroturfed to me... I
totally can be wrong about that feeling, but it's my feeling and I own it.

~~~
shinoda
Ironic you mention the astroturfing, as the person you replied to is the
creator of ClassicPress ;)

The creator likes to namedrop ClassicPress everywhere on the WP.org forums and
WPTavern. He's had his posts removed from the wp.org forums due to spam too.

------
laken
I'm an active core-contributor to WordPress, and I maintain a core component
(Privacy) currently.

Even within the core-contributor community, there is a lot of friction,
particularly with the "less popular" components. Accessibility was the first
to snap, with the lead resigning, but not after other big contributors took
long breaks when needed most. BDFL Matt hasn't helped heal the fractures and
has hurt even more components since. The Privacy component, for example, was
the butt of a joke during his WordCamp Europe keynote, boiling down our
efforts over the past year as asking users to take cookies, which hurt Privacy
team morale (the Privacy team primarily worked on creating a standardized way
in the core to identify and export personal data, and help people create
Privacy Policies by standardizing how plugins can identify what data they
collect).

The largest issue is React -- it's so different than the rest of the WordPress
core, that 90% of the core developers can't work on Gutenberg issues.
WordPress is primarily PHP, and if JS is used, most places jQuery is the
framework of choice. It's dated, but it works quite well still. React is quite
the departure from all of those technologies, and will cause gigantic rifts in
the community. I do believe WordPress will survive, but with thousands of
plugins lost forever due to lack of updating.

~~~
ergo14
Component approach is good, but why force everyone to use React or any
particular framework? Wouldn't it be better to implement this as vanilla js
component? Either via web component or just plain custom element.

Nowdays there are some really good solutions like quillJS or prosemirror that
are not tied to particular solutions.

~~~
Raphmedia
It's the WYSIWYG in the admin and you can still opt out to use TinyMCE. AFAIK,
the front-end of Wordpress isn't using React.

~~~
smacktoward
Yet.

~~~
Raphmedia
Even if they were to make the default theme based on React, nobody is using
it. Everyone switch to something else right after install.

Should they change the entire stack to use React, they would lose a lot of
their community. A lot of their users are code novices that make do with
simple HTML and some PHP snippets.

------
snowwrestler
I think Gutenberg solves the wrong problem for Wordpress. I don't think that
many people were crying out for a fancier way to store giant messy blobs in
MySQL.

Why does someone select Wordpress in 2018? Why even host a website at all?
Because they want to build something custom. But because Wordpress core
continues to be basically a simple blog engine, anything fancy has to get
implemented as custom code and/or super powerful themes and plugins that are
almost like mini CMSs unto themselves. This is where a lot of the security
problems in Wordpress sites often come from, BTW.

IMO Wordpress could do a lot more for itself long term by improving the
flexibility and power of its core, rather than its WYSIWYG.

~~~
gboudrias
I'm sort-of leaving tech, but I've worked in web dev for 8 years, and this is
the first I hear of Gutenberg.

From what I understand, it's better WYSIWYG. Great, but we have entire essays
demonstrating how WYSIWYG is garbage. Alright but people want WYSIWYG!

To me, this seems like a manifestation of the limits inherent to the
simplification of UI. The frontend _needs_ complex information to be able to
correctly produce a beautiful design. Ultimately, the user needs to be aware
of the concepts (too complex, apparently), or the design needs to be automated
and therefore simplistic. WYSIWYG is the unhappy compromise demonstrating that
consistency begets complexity.

If this dilemma really is unsolvable, then Wordpress is but one of iteration
in a grand cycle of its victims. I worked mainly with Drupal, and the
situation there isn't much better, they've simply opted for sophistication
over usability.

~~~
Kagerjay
> Great, but we have entire essays demonstrating how WYSIWYG is garbage

Markdown is great and all, I personally use it mostly for README docs and git
tracking. But WYSIWYG is what most blog sites are embracing

Examples (but not limited to)

\- Medium

\- Ghost → Ghost 2.0

\- Webflow + Design tools

\- Notion + Notetaking tools

\- Premade website tools (WIX, squarespace, Shopify Page Builder, etc) are
gaining ground over wordpress traditionally

WYSIWYG has a learning curve associated with it, but it doesn't have to be
complicated. Personally, I prefer GUI tools over non GUI counterparts anyhow.
These include tools in atom/visual studio code for doing git commits /
branching etc.

People are more than willing to learn how to use a WYSIWYG interface if the
value they get long term is worth it. Ideally, cost should be minimized
(learning) and benefits maximized(building quick blog posts how they want).
Blogs are _exactly_ that though, you spend a little bit of time learning the
framework, and spend a lot of time using it. The amount a user is willing to
learn proportional depends how much they will use it long term.

For a one off task, a user is not willing to spend as much time learning a
WYSIWYG GUI tool, and would rather pick something more familiar like markdown
or .txt. Examples include learning how to use a new video editing tool, with
advanced feature sets (Adobe Premiere, etc) if you don't make videos often.
Rather you would prefer learning a simpler tool instead (Adobe spark, etc)

From research I've done the market is largely shifting towards WYISWYG and
from a UX research standpoint, this makes sense. Getting exactly what you want
lowers the barrier and confusion / expectations of what you receive.

You can quote buzzfeed essays all day, but I always take research with a grain
of salt unless (1) the author is reputable (2) it validates research and data
I've observed from a number of various reputable sources / my own research. UX
is just common sense at the end of the day

\------------------------------------------------------------------

> The frontend needs complex information to be able to correctly produce a
> beautiful design

Not necessarily true, just use a CSS framework and it simplifies a lot of the
process. Take your pick with functional CSS like tailwinds, bootstrap, or just
modify your own classes. WYISYWG just wraps things in classes as necessary

I've looked at Gutenburg, it looks promising. I've spoken to a number of core
devs from gutenburg. I don't really like the tinyMCE editor that much
honestly, or the Jetpack installed wordpress.com instance. They both have
issues. TinyMCE editor doesn't reflect proper nominal width for a blog at
~800px, so sometimes the results are skewed when previewed live

Jetpack wordpress.com's editor is more closer to what optimal words per line /
font-size / width to write should be. However, it has some serious flaws when
using 3rd party plugins (such as adding prismJS code snippets) and its a pain
to work with

~~~
superhuzza
"UX is just common sense at the end of the day."

Oh boy would you be surprised. The whole reason we do research is because
users consistently break our expectations, in the most uncommon ways.

~~~
photomatt
+1000

------
NeedMoreTea
Having trialled the new offering thanks to a banner in my Wordpress dashboard,
I went right back to the old editor. Trouble with the new one is the UX is
hostile - everything needs an extra dozen clicks for the most simple things.

I want to publish a post about as fast as writing a text or word doc. The
current wordpress editor is unexciting but has a fairly decent workflow.
Faffing about with everything on a pulldown or modal is not progress.

A fair summary of my views of Gutenberg:

[https://www.dedoimedo.com/computers/wordpress-
gutenberg.html](https://www.dedoimedo.com/computers/wordpress-gutenberg.html)

~~~
Angostura
It may need a few extra click for simple things. But it makes slightly more
complex things _much_ simpler

~~~
jononor
But most of the time one does simple things. Hurting the common case to
improve a rare case is rarely a good tradeoff.

~~~
zaphar
The common case for wordpress hasn't been just blogging for quite some time
now. The common case is brochure sites for businesses. I wouldn't be surprised
to find that writing a simple blog post is actually the rare use case these
days.

~~~
at-fates-hands
This is the Achilles heel of Wordpress.

WP is now getting a a TON of competition from static site generators, and
companies like Netlify. Headless CMS' and Jamstack are the future for these
types of sites and people are coming off of Drupal and Wordpress in huge
numbers.

As their numbers have shrunk, they've had to make drastic changes. I haven't
been seriously involved in the WP community for about five years, but I've
heard rumblings within the community about moving to a modern stack that
includes ReactJS or VueJS for a while now.

At the very least they're trying to maintain their position and modernize WP
to appease some of the critics and vocal members of their community.

------
sleavey
I really like it. About 9 months ago I started working on a plugin for my
workplace to turn the platform into a logbook for our researchers, and got to
build from scratch for the new platform, so to be fair I am not experiencing
any of my prior work breaking, but I do like what I see.

Adding extra behaviour to the classic editor is fragile, especially if the
feature involves adding or changing something about an existing part of the
UI. Gutenberg makes this relatively simple, and at least provides a blessed
way of doing this (via plugins), whereas before you relied on the structure of
the editor's HTML not changing and breaking your stuff.

Furthermore, everything is retrieved and sent via the REST API which seems
like a great approach: it means you can reuse your plugin logic for other
parts of the site, and in principle the new editor can be bolted on to some
other non-Wordpress projects with only a few adaptions, and WordPress itself
may one day be implemented in something other than PHP.

One other thing I like is the ease of use of Gutenberg. While it takes a few
extra clicks for things, novices won't care about that, and having more visual
clues will really help them. Plus, the blocks now give you a way to make
things truly WYSIWYG, especially shortcodes which are otherwise just short
strings that only generate their content when you preview the page. Now it's
possible to make blocks instead of shortcodes that render whatever needs
rendered in the editor.

I guess Automattic could have handled the development better, and given more
time for the update to be tested and for the community to be informed and give
their feedback. In 2017 they kept saying they'd release it in early 2018,
which has come and gone, so I can't help but think they're pushing this out in
a desperate bid to hit their original deadline at least in terms of the year.
That part might bite them later, especially if there are any huge bugs yet to
be discovered.

------
SquareWheel
I used it for a recent WP site and found it quite intuitive to use. The
generated code is clean, and it integrates well with shortcodes and third-
party content. I generally prefer code view to WYSIWYG, but it's one of the
nicer editors I've used.

I found some of the keyboard shortcuts to be unintuitive. Toggling between
code and visual modes required four button presses. Edit>Redo is also weird as
it uses Ctrl+Shift+Z, not Ctrl+Y.

Overall though I think it's a positive change. I hope that Gutenberg manages
to kill all those awful page builder plugins like WPBakery and Visual
Composer. That would make me happy.

~~~
pbowyer
> Edit>Redo is also weird as it uses Ctrl+Shift+Z, not Ctrl+Y.

I am always confused which shortcut to use for Redo on Windows. Microsoft
software is Ctrl+Y but I must've grown up using software that chose
Ctrl+Shift+Z as that's what I always try first.

------
kkoppenhaver
Commented a couple times here, but we've been making a concerted effort to
inform past clients of the coming of Gutenberg.

It seems that outside of the dev community and people actively involved in
WordPress news, there's very little familiarity with the fact that Gutenberg
is coming.

We've launched a productized service[1] that helps people take an audit of
their site, get familiar with using Gutenberg and give them resources to make
the transition.

We've mostly found that's it's been going smoothly, but there are plenty of
cases where sites have different customizations that will need to be worked
around or refactored.

The Gutenberg team is working hard on making sure legacy things are handled
properly, but there's a lot out there and it definitely needs to be taken on a
case by case basis.

[1][https://alphaparticle.com/gutenberg](https://alphaparticle.com/gutenberg)

------
jonheller
I work at an agency building large websites for a variety of clients, and so
far am in love with Gutenberg. The block based approach is huge, especially
for many of our clients in the news and editorial space that write long pieces
of content with a lot of different components (text and images of course, but
also quotes, asides, interactive embeds, donations, related stories, etc).

------
AstroJetson
I got into WP to build a site that tracks robot teams and competition events.
I didn't want to write PHP but found a great plugin called PODS. It allowed me
to do all the inter-page linkage (orgs->teams->robots) without any PHP.
Another plugin does calendar stuff for the events.

It was quick and easy to set it up, and works pretty smoothly.

I've tried Gutenberg and wasn't that impressed. It wasn't adding to anything I
was doing and it managed to break two small items.

I know that the WP people are trying to go against Wix, etc. I'd like to have
also seen them split into the new React and kept the "classic". I'll most
likely become one of the 1000's of sites that become frozen on a 4.9.x
release. It will be interesting to see if there are updates in the 4.9 tree or
if it will be 5.0 only.

I look at the Wix, Weebly, etc market place has being worth WP going after and
I'm sure they will try to pull company/vendor sites from the Facebook and I'm
good with that. But one of the powers of WP is the ability to make pretty
complex sites using PHP/Plugins. Moving to React isn't going to make that
easy.

I really think that this is a case of dumbing down a product may not be a good
idea for lots of the current users.

------
exotree
This article is a year old. Does anyone know the current status of the
Gutenberg release? Article says first half of 2018 and we are well past that.

~~~
kkoppenhaver
The 1st beta of WordPress 5.0 was released today (which includes Gutenberg).
Outside of discovering any major blockers, the current plan is to release 5.0
on November 19.

~~~
Tallain
3.5 weeks feels awfully short to go from beta to production on a change so
big. Isn't Gutenberg going to be the new default, no opt-out? Kind of makes me
nervous.

~~~
kkoppenhaver
You can still opt-out by installing the Classic Editor plugin[1]. That will
disable Gutenberg and let you keep the current experience.

[1][https://wordpress.org/plugins/classic-
editor/](https://wordpress.org/plugins/classic-editor/)

~~~
frereubu
There's also this plugin which removes all other references to Gutenberg so if
you're building sites for clients they aren't able to accidentally switch the
classic editor off, and don't get nag screens about trying Gutenberg.
[https://wordpress.org/plugins/classic-editor-
addon/](https://wordpress.org/plugins/classic-editor-addon/)

------
matt4077
I did not know that their motto is:

> _‘Clean, Lean, and Mean’_

And even after double-checking, I can only assume it's somewhat outdated, or
outright irony. Because while I consider WP among the software that has done
the most good over the last few decades, those three words really don't come
to mind when trying to describe it.

Of course at the time it came out it's immediate comparisons where these
$7-digit behemoths being sold to Fortune 500 companies, and it probably did
not rely on plugins as much as it does now. So I can see how clean & mean made
sense at the time.

~~~
lbriner
I think they mean the core is clean, lean and mean. The reality is that most
people will use themes, customisations of themes and a stack of plugins so
what you end up with on disk is none of the above.

Most of us never have to touch the core though.

~~~
rocketpastsix
The core is a mess too. And they refuse to modernize their code.

------
zackify
The way data is stored is very frustrating. Storing what should be json as
html so it could try to be backwards compatible.

I made a library[1] to make blocks so I’ve been using Gutenberg a few months.
Feels like it could be really really nice if a few changes were made. I
commend the WP community for making it though.

Big issues are with trying to make more than just a few blocks, the editor
really doesn’t enforce and code splitting. So unless you’re using a library
like the one I created, having let’s say, 100 blocks is going to mean an
insane amount of JS on page load. Also, good luck trying to debug the stack
traces you’ll get in browser. I could go on but the point is: Gutenberg is a
nice idea but real projects will find issues.

[1]
[https://github.com/Crossfield/gutenblock](https://github.com/Crossfield/gutenblock)

------
photomatt
Howdy — lead of WordPress here. When the article was written in January of
2018, I would agree Gutenberg wasn't ready for core. Ten months later, it's
come a long way. _There have been 41 public releases of Gutenberg, and close
to 600,000 sites are using it already._ It's the mostly widely tested (and
adopted) new feature code we've had in any release of WordPress in my memory.
It might not be for everyone, which is why we created the Classic Editor
plugin which you can install today, and when 5.0 comes out in a few weeks your
site will look and work pretty much exactly like it does today, and you can
migrate to Gutenberg at your leisure, or perhaps not at all. (There are lots
of ways to post and interact with WordPress, including the command line via
wp-cli.)

A big advantage of blocks is they will allow us to simplify many of the
different concepts and interfaces throughout WordPress, including our old
WYSIWYG sorta-blocks, shortcodes, widgets, menus, and embeds of all types. It
solves literally hundreds of interactions where people used to get stuck in
our old WYSIWYG and either switch to code view to fix things, or just give up.
Like all software, the 5.0 release of WordPress isn't a finish line, it's a
starting one. We are already planning for 5.1 and beyond (including minimum
PHP updates) and we look forward to bringing the fast, public iteration cycle
that Gutenberg has demonstrated to more parts of core.

~~~
laken
Hey Matt! I'm not denying the massive amount of testing and effort going into
Gutenberg, as I do see it. I am however worried about the new block editor
hurting the good reputation WordPress has, particularly in regards to
accessibility.

Hacker News isn't the right place for this discussion, I know, but I want to
get it out there. Accessibility is one of the best features of WordPress, even
if most people don't know about it. Keeping the WordPress editor accessible
not only helps people with disabilities, as it also aids people who may have a
temporary ailment (holding their baby, and just having one hand available, for
example), or even "invisible" disabilities such as dyslexia, ADHD, or an
Autism Spectrum disorder.

The new block editor has made tremendous strides at improving individual
component's accessibility recently, and I believe that's where the confusion
and miscommunication comes in between all the core teams. Code-wise, the block
editor is quite accessible; zoomed out, the editor as a whole isn't. It's a UX
issue, more than a development one. It's what happens when the design isn't
with accessibility in mind.

I don't think it's worth punting release, but I really would like to see more
work on documentation and warnings in the core to people who rely on assistive
technologies. If you don't know the layout of the block editor and had to
navigate it with only a keyboard and no eyesight, it's incredibly confusing!
If there was proper documentation, you might be able to explain the layout and
mechanics, which would help, though still not solve all the problems.

If someone is blind and has a blog, in my experience, 90% of them use
WordPress because it's very friendly to them when they want to write. It's not
a fair comparison, as TinyMCE merely is a glorified text-field, but that's
also one of the old selling points of WordPress -- super simple out of the
box.

It's my understanding that a lot of the preliminary design for Gutenberg was
behind closed doors inside of Automattic, before publicly being brought out to
the public and collaboration ensued. I don't believe there is anything wrong
with this, as it happens within many FLOSS projects by corporate interests
that rely on the platform. I do though wish that in the initial design phase,
accessibility was a goal, not an afterthought. It may have been a goal too,
not denying that, but there might have been a lack of expertise in regards to
how to make interfaces fully accessible.

I don't mean to attack the editor, Automattic, or you about this. I know
you've heard a lot about it. I love the block editor; it's such a pleasant
experience for me to use. I worry that people though who aren't as able-bodied
as I won't feel the same though.

Finally, I have a hunch that Automattic itself has now found that it needs
expertise on Accessibility, which is why there's this:
[https://automattic.com/work-with-us/product-designer-
accessi...](https://automattic.com/work-with-us/product-designer-
accessibility/)

I do believe in WordPress.org, and I love Automattic as a company and their
stance in regards to the open web. I like that Automattic is a company built
on my personal-favorite legal document, the GNU GPL. I'm looking forward to
the day that the block editor is accessible, as it's not now. I do believe it
will be. I only wish there was a stronger push before :)

~~~
photomatt
The best read about Accessibility in Gutenberg is here:

[https://make.wordpress.org/core/2018/10/18/regarding-
accessi...](https://make.wordpress.org/core/2018/10/18/regarding-
accessibility-in-gutenberg/)

Accessibility has been thought about from the beginning, and no design
happened behind closed doors (it was kicked off and announced at WCUS 2016),
but we are doing a fundamentally more complex task with block manipulation.

I'm not sure what the best path forward is there. We'll continue to make the
block editor friendlier to accommodate accessibility needs, and I also think
it's important that WordPress has a variety of ways to post to it, from email,
to other apps, to the command line... by supporting as we always have a ton of
ways to get content in and out of WordPress it'll allow people to use the
interface they enjoy the most.

------
ealhad
I was thinking of another Gutenberg:
[https://github.com/Keats/gutenberg](https://github.com/Keats/gutenberg) /
[https://getgutenberg.io](https://getgutenberg.io)

It's a static site generator.

~~~
Keats
I am going to change name for the next release because of the confusion
though!

~~~
stronglikedan
And miss out on the free discovery?

~~~
Keats
Not really free discovery when every search will be about the WordPress editor
or Project Gutenberg and a static site generator will be on page 3-4 :/

------
mgkimsal
Background: Had a walkthrough demo and code dive at our PHP group a few months
ago. One of the guys in our coworking space runs a WP user group. I've used WP
for some projects for years. I like it for small to medium content, but have
hated doing large "dev" projects on it (ecommerce, etc)

Gutenberg thoughts: It's seemed to me that much of WP success in the last
several years has been driven by the ecosystem of page/theme builders, which
have been built around serving various verticals. They've solved a core
problem of not having easy baked-in structured data management, and Gutenberg
looks like it's a first step in standardizing that. It seems the tools
community will need to adapt to that, which they might, but it also seems like
it might be taking away some of their value-add, and there may not be enough
room higher-up the chain to add value.

I don't know if there's a huge reason for some of the theme/page services to
rush to support the upgraded 5.x series; if it makes it easier to switch to a
competitor... will they have much incentive?

This is certainly a shift in the WP world, but it feels like it's at a point
where they could lose a chunk of users to competitors. For a lot of other
users, though... where would they go? As with many upgrades, if the pain is
too much for not much value, that's a time when people would consider other
options more seriously.

------
acomjean
I did end up at the Boston wordcamp conference where one of the Gutenberg
developers was speaking as the keynote.

Like the article says: They see for-profit site builders: squarespace, wix ...
as eating Wordpress market share and feel a need to advance Wordpress to make
it competitive. They know it’s risky but they see it as an important way to
stay relevant.

Wordpress users seem on board with this. A lot of them aren’t developers and
want easier solutions to hand their clients.

(Except the guy with the “Gutenberg not in core t short”

------
aritmo
Gutenberg allows to write structured documents just like you should do with a
word processor.

I can imagine many people having trouble to adapt because they are not
familiar with using styles and templates.

I was not familiar with Gutenberg and was offered to activate it a few months
ago. I did so and manage to make it work for me.

I consider that writing structured documents is part of personal advancement
in IT and should be viewed as such.

------
sandov
I got scared from the title because I thought that project Gutenberg[1] had
died or something

[1][https://www.gutenberg.org/](https://www.gutenberg.org/)

~~~
thrower123
What an incredible shame that would be! I just hope that we can get some
copyright reform someday, at least for non-Disney entities. It's absurd that
it can be easier to find a bestseller from 1850 than one from 1950.

------
hbcondo714
This article was published in Jan 10, 2018; what's the current state of
Gutenberg?

~~~
kkoppenhaver
Gutenberg has been progressing on GitHub. It just got merged into the beta
version of WP 5.0 release today, which is slated for general release on
November 19.

------
bovermyer
I love the Gutenberg interface.

However, I also think Automattic has made life for themselves much, much
harder by fragmenting the code base like this. WordPress was always monolithic
in its approach, and trying to tack on a (newer, more modern, but still wholly
different) core component is a major risk.

I'm working on a migration plan to some other platform as part of our business
continuity plan. The stability of WordPress was its biggest selling feature.
Now, that will no longer exist.

------
frereubu
We build sites with complex data structures on WordPress using CMB2 for custom
fields. I think Gutenberg has its place, but if you want to build anything of
any real size you're going to need data structures (i.e. content types with
defined relationships), and Gutenberg doesn't allow that. It's an odd kind of
structured layout tool that I think will confuse a lot of people.

For all their faults (which are less and less as it develops), WYSIWYG fields
using TinyMCE have the massive advantage that they look like the word
processors that most people are familiar with. Beyond small personal blogs I
just don't think Gutenberg adds any value, and if anything muddies the water
for site editors if you're using structured data _and_ Gutenberg.

We've taken the decision to disable Gutenberg entirely and just use custom
fields so we can maintain stable data structures, rather than trying to
crowbar that into Gutenberg somehow. All you need to do is only use custom
post types without the "editor" capability, hide the Posts menu item, and
define everything through CMB2 custom fields.

~~~
andybak
I build Django sites often based around TinyMCE and this is my experience. If
you've got a blob of content then drop in an MCE field but the minute you're
dealing with structured data - WYSIWYG often makes things more complex.

TinyMCE really is quite extensible and flexible if you keep to it's sweet
spot. It can produce fairly clean and consistent markup based on a whitelist
of elements - which is critical if you're storing HTML directly in a database
field.

------
ukyrgf
I thought this article was pretty insightful, regarding Gutenberg and
Automattic's response to the open source community:
[https://foliovision.com/2018/10/gutenberg-f35-of-
cms](https://foliovision.com/2018/10/gutenberg-f35-of-cms)

And since then, these two troubling things have happened:

Oct 9, Accessibility team lead resigns over Gutenberg -
[https://wptavern.com/wordpress-accessibility-team-lead-
resig...](https://wptavern.com/wordpress-accessibility-team-lead-resigns-
cites-political-complications-related-to-gutenberg)

Oct 17, Accessibility audit canceled, because the new accessibility team lead
"didn’t have the authority to authorize it in the first place" \-
[https://wptavern.com/gutenberg-accessibility-audit-
postponed...](https://wptavern.com/gutenberg-accessibility-audit-postponed-
indefinitely)

------
pier25
I get that Automattic wants to compete with Wix, etc, but throwing the
Wordpress community and ecosystem under the bus is not the way to go.

Gutenberg has its place in the web dev world of 2018 but it should have been a
completely new project instead of a replacement of good old Wordpress.

------
corradomatt
The thing that really concerns me with WordPress and Gutenberg is performance.
Gutenberg is great but there is never much concern to making the front-end
less top heavy. Gutenberg is likely to make this worse. Each block will add
it's own CSS and JS...and the bloat will be immense. Instead of users adding a
single page builder plugin, they'll add a whole bunch of individual blocks and
each one will load more and more external scripts. PageSpeed scores will be
dismal.

~~~
photomatt
Blocks need not do that, and most should be no more overhead than what people
were already doing in posts. Perhaps is a big focus though, but one that's
been easier to address outside of core with things like expanded CDN support
in the latest version of Jetpack Photon.

------
Jnr
I like the Gutenberg approach a lot.

Maybe it still requires some polishing but I think that people don't like it
mostly because it is something new and they are not used to it yet.

------
sharmi
Fyi, I would really like to keep as far away as possible from wordpress.

On the other hand, while everyone predicts the death of wordpress, there is
still no viable alternative. So many projects on Indiehackers start on
wordpress still. There is still no customizable, verstaile alternative for
wordpress in spite of its many failings.

If there is an alternative with an ecosystem as big as wordpress, or atleast
has the growth potential to become one, I am very eager to know.

~~~
mgkimsal
> If there is an alternative with an ecosystem as big as wordpress, or atleast
> has the growth potential to become one, I am very eager to know.

There probably won't be, because it would introduce many of the same problems
WP has.

If you want an ecommerce platform, there are plenty to choose from. Throwing
'woocommerce' on top of your blog solves some problems, but creates (many)
others, and if your focus is ecommerce, use a more focused platform. It's the
"it can do everything for all people" aspect which has created some of the
problems we see.

~~~
CM30
To be honest, I'd say WooCommerce is probably one of the easiest to use
solutions for eCommerce. I mean, Magento is complicated enough that whole
companies exist around it and where anything less than a VPS is probably not
gonna handle it well, and OpenCart is a bit of a car crash when it comes to
figuring out where to get support/decent plugins/documentation. Given those
types of alternatives, well, at least WooCommerce is simple enough to pick up
for someone who's used WordPress before, and doesn't require learning a whole
second overly bloated/complicated CMS system to set up.

What is the best solution for a decent shop nowadays? At least if you want to
host it yourself and not rely on a service like Shopify?

~~~
mgkimsal
i briefly inherited a woocommerce system with 62 plugins, and because it was
so 'easy', the original devs hadn't bothered with things like child themes or
version control or documenting any thing they did or why. The WP ecosystem
doesn't easily allow for dev sites / testing, and at least one of the plugins
was tied to a domain name and wasn't easy to use on non-prod systems.

Paid support from some plugin vendors _always_ ends up with "disable all
plugins except ours first and run everything that way before you ask for
anything else". "Even the plugins that this one depends on?" I'd ask, to no
reply. I understand why, but plugin vendors will point the finger at other
plugins - sometimes rightly so - but when so many plugins can change global
state all the time, it's a pain to track down what's breaking.

Any time I bring experiences like this up, I'm told "no one has 60 plugins,
that's horrendous, I'd never have more than 5 plugins on any WP project ever,
you should have started over, you're exaggerating" \- some combination of
those sentiments. There were 62 (or 65) plugins - IIRC somewhere around 10-12
weren't actively used.

When I inherit projects, I often argue for greenfield rebuilds with the
lessons learned from the previous project. When that goes through, I often hit
a valley of "we should have refactored". When starting off on the "refactor"
path, I often hit a valley of "this should have been rebuilt". There's often
not much way to put good tests around WP stuff to get the confidence and
repeatability needed to move forward with large scale customizations.

If you start from scratch, have a talented team who understands all aspects of
WP development and document things, perhaps it's "good" to start with?

If you're selling a handful of items... yeah. If you're happy with existing
themes and don't want any substantive behavioural changes to how
themes/plugins work, yeah. Use it. When you want custom or large changes to
how the $80 theme sellers think you should run an ecommerce store... I
wouldn't recommend it, and I don't know what I'd recommend, really.

Other options: The Sylius project? Foxycart?

Some of the commerce projects I've dealt with are doing hundreds of thousands
of dollars, up to millions in sales. They were pushed to woocommerce because
'it's cheap, can do XYZ, no need for "expensive programmers", etc'. You're
doing $800k in sales and have no unit tests on the code running your entire
operation? On top of that you want changes to fundamental code bits, without
easy to setup dev/test/staging/prod workflow or unit tests? Scares the crap
out of me. But yeah, I'm not a WP-head, so perhaps you get used to that level
of "seat of the pants" working? Or... you spend so much time/effort setting up
custom workflow that you can now easily churn out "woocommerce" work with some
level of repeatability and confidence? You're probably not on the 'cheap' end,
which is often a selling point for WP/woo work.

No doubt, I know that the woocommerce base is used on some big projects. I
also have to imagine they had larger teams of people doing custom work
fulltime for a long period of uninterrupted time. If you have that team and
are doing customizations and integrations, you're not in the realm of "I need
something simple that's not magento".

Ultimately, it depends on your needs and skills. Solo/small team, already
'know' WP with existing skills in that world, use woo - knock yourself out.
But don't color too far outside the lines.

~~~
dwd
This...

For a WordPress only site, half a dozen plugins for specific functionality is
what I aim for.

But WooCommerce, they pile up really quickly just for core requirements like
payment gateways, a quickview, wishlist: Things that are core or would be
baked into the theme in Magento.

62, wow. I flip out if they had half that. Usually they're running some sort
of cruddy backup system, multiple security plugins because they got hacked
previously (not surprised) and a dozen plugins that they don't need.

------
hassanjahan
Great points, I do believe any software has a lifecycle and WordPress is at
the end of the road. Curious to see if Getneberg can change this situation.

------
bookofjoe
It would appear that I'm the only one reading this who uses TypePad (since
2004). True, it's clunky, unchanging, and very slow — but that translates to
ease of use and reliability.

------
fishbone
What are the economic opportunities for React developers with Gutenberg?

------
coding123
This is a step in the right direction. -someone that stopped using WordPress
when porn started appearing automatically in random folders because the view
tech is php

------
bernardlunn
Writing as an English coder ie I code in the English language so that the
human compiler can parse what I write aka more of a hack than a hacker.

Wordpress.org appeals to hackers, but Wordpress.com appeals to hacks. No tech
support needed, no 3am beepers because a badly behaved plugin wet the bed.

So I am happy that Wordpress is slow to intro new software. Make it work and
make it intuitive. Wordpress is the least annoying tech vendor - like Apple in
their best days (not now sadly). Not perfect - who is? Would like better
wysiwyg editing. But bigger beef is search. It sucks. I use Google to find
info on my own site.

~~~
modernerd
You might like to try [https://searchwp.com](https://searchwp.com) if you're
hosting your own site (it wasn't quite clear from your comment).

It lets you tweak search results by giving different weights to titles,
categories, excerpts, and more. I'm not affiliated, but if the default search
is no good on your site it might help you get the results you expect instead.

------
lkrubner
A bit of history:

Up till 2004, the king of all blog software was Moveable Type, written in
Perl. In theory, you had to pay for this, but there was a liberal free
license. Then in 2004 they got strict and said, hey, everyone has to pay.

This set off a movement to find another free blog software package. For awhile
it seemed like there were roughly a million blog software packages, written in
different languages. PHP was easy to learn, so it gained traction. Blossom was
big, Typo was big. Then WordPress gained traction.

During the long era when other blog software was dying, and WordPress was
emerging as the clear winner, the success of WordPress was driven by the
understanding of BDFL Matt that designers loved it. It worked well with
software such as Dreamweaver. People came to PHP because it was easy to learn,
and so WordPress should also be easy to learn. Because of this, Matt insisted
that WordPress stick with PHP 4, rather than PHP 5, for many years. I believe
PHP 5 had been around for 6 or 7 years before WordPress began using it. I
believe Matt was worried that the Object Oriented ideas in PHP 5 would be
difficult for newcomers to learn.

I believe the decision to stick with easy-to-learn PHP 4 was essential to the
success that WordPress enjoyed during that era.

Which is why I am so surprised by Gutenberg. Telling the whole community that
they need to learn React is a shocking change of tactics. Instead of focusing
on easy-to-learn, WordPress suddenly wants to become best-of-breed? That is a
different niche in the ecosystem of CMSs. Once a good value Honda, WordPress
now wants to be the high quality BMW.

React radically increases the amount that new developers will have to learn to
become proficient with WordPress. And if you're asking developers to radically
increase their investment, then suddenly they are going to consider other
options, such as Ruby On Rails. If WordPress suddenly becomes one of those
frameworks that needs 2 years of hard study before you really understand it,
then maybe you should be learning some other framework during those 2 years?
Because there is also a lot of ugliness and technical debt in WordPress,
things that made sense when the focus was "make life easy for designers" but
which don't make sense if the goal is "be the best framework."

I was around in 2001 when PHP-Nuke decided to go down a similar road. The
decision was made that it would be refactored into a series of components,
each of which would have an elegant interface for interacting with the other
components. PHP-Nuke was going to clean up its technical debt, become more
secure, adopt best practices. But previously it had been playing the role of
"easiest way to set up a blog or forum". It gave up one role and tried to
become something else completely. It self-destructed. Two years later it was
dead, no one was using it.

It seems to me that WordPress is going down the same road as PHP-Nuke.
Obviously WordPress is a much bigger community than PHP-Nuke ever was, but it
seems like it is making the same kind of mistake. I thought Matt was extremely
wise for sticking with PHP 4 for so long, but Gutenberg seems like the kind of
mistake he would have been making if he'd adopted PHP 5 too soon.

~~~
smacktoward
_> Once a good value Honda, WordPress now wants to be the high quality BMW._

This is the heart of it.

To extend the analogy further, they actually could take a page from the car
industry. When Toyota and Honda and Nissan wanted to move from the value-for-
money segment into the luxury-car segment, they invented new brands for those
luxury products (Lexus, Acura and Infiniti, respectively) instead of trying to
convince people that "Toyota" and "Honda" and "Nissan" stood for something
different today than they did yesterday. And this strategy has been quite
successful, letting them grow into a new market without undercutting their
hard-won position in the old one.

~~~
jim_bailie
Very good insight. WP should take your words to heart.

------
ttty
Have tried it? It's really buggy. The head of UX quit because of the amount of
bugs.

Not only technical bugs, the UI is poorly designed.

~~~
cferthorney
I thought it was the lead of accessibility, Rien Rietveld, who quit?

The article announcing Riet's resignation is
[https://rianrietveld.com/2018/10/09/i-have-resigned-the-
word...](https://rianrietveld.com/2018/10/09/i-have-resigned-the-wordpress-
accessibility-team/) (Working at time of writing this comment)

~~~
sirmac1k
After reading resignation you've linked... That's no way to lead an
innovation. Especially for such a big FOSS project.

Automattic's position of quite verbally "throwing" Gutenberg at users and
developers at any cost just shows a really bad example of business driven FOSS
project as a base for commercial product (.org for .com).

A11y is just one of the victims. Other community members creating WordPress
based websites, services and plugins (myself included) are mostly thrown
overboard as a collateral damage. Either learn react fast and figure Gutenberg
out by yourself or maybe we'll let you come back later _if and when_ we get to
work at least on some documentation and the well-known issues that affect you.
With Gutenberg's extensibility being the biggest and most harming one for WP
ecosystem.

------
canhascodez
The only way to "save" WordPress is to destroy it. The core was not written
before PHP had classes, but the project chose to maintain backwards
compatibility with a project that was. It's the worst popular codebase, and as
this shows, it can't be modernized without changing it into something
fundamentally different.

------
sweetp
tbh, ive moved away from Wordpress, I find it too bloated for my needs. I been
experimenting with Jekyll, and think eventually ill move over to Hugo.

------
nqzero
anyone have a sense whether this frontend could be decoupled from the php
backend ?

~~~
phonon
Would love to know as well!

------
musgrove
WordPress is having their "Thesis 2" moment. Ironic, really.

------
rustcharm
It's the end, but it would have died anyway. While WordPress's success is
amazing, it's still a pile of PHP that requires constant diligence to keep it
running safely.

I use it myself for a simple corporate blog, because it's so widely supported
and everything else sucks even worse....

~~~
x3sphere
> I use it myself for a simple corporate blog, because it's so widely
> supported and everything else sucks even worse....

So how is it the end if everything else sucks? Maybe they are stumbling here
with Gutenberg (I haven't tried it or even researched it much), but it seems
far from the end.

I still don't expect anything to overtake WP. A big reason is that too many
agencies rely on it at this point, they aren't going to want to switch to
anything else. Also for lower budget clients, pitching anything other than WP
is a hard sell these days, as an increasing amount of non tech-savvy users are
familiar with it.

------
quipper
Gutenberg converts tasks that used to take 2-3 clicks into 10-20 click tasks,
or even worse makes them impossible altogether.

What is with catering to the worst and most clueless users only? We need more
than that. We deserve more than that. Gutenberg is disastrous for anyone with
an IQ above that of a carrot.

But are there any real alternatives?

~~~
ubernostrum
_What is with catering to the worst and most clueless users only? We need more
than that. We deserve more than that. Gutenberg is disastrous for anyone with
an IQ above that of a carrot._

Well, insulting hyperbole certainly isn't going to help.

From what I can tell (I haven't used Wordpress in a long time, so I didn't
know about this), the main complaint is it's more touch-optimized, and as a
result desktop editing with trackpad/mouse is more complex.

That's a fair criticism, but not a conclusive argument against. If the most
common use case for non-technical users is a touch interface, then making that
the default, and giving highly-technical users who prefer the old editor a way
to swap back to it... seems like a perfectly reasonable decision to me, and
one that should be made on the basis of user research and usage stats, not on
the basis of people who sling insults and leave 1-star reviews on a plugin
marketplace.

