222 - 'G' is for Gutenberg

‘A-Z of WordPress’ with Nathan Wrigley and David Waumsley

This is part of our A-Z of WordPress series (where we attempt to cover all the major aspects of building and maintaining sites with WordPress). Today it’s the letter G is for… Gutenberg (Goootenberg!)

To celebrate this Nathan has forced me to use a reusable (Gutenberg) block for the show notes!

I can report that it went well!!!! (Nathan wrote this regardless of how David coped!).

Yep… I’m thinking of a complete swap. Gutenberg for show notes and Google docs for client websites.

Preamble

So for those of you have been busy (blissfully unaware) for the last 2-3 years. According to the repo entry for the plugin:

“Gutenberg” is a codename for a whole new paradigm in WordPress site building and publishing, that aims to revolutionize the entire publishing experience as much as Gutenberg did the printed word. Right now, the project is in the first phase of a four-phase process that will touch every piece of WordPress — Editing, Customization, Collaboration, and Multilingual — and is focused on a new editing experience, the block editor.

Do you buy this?

• The language is kind of funny here. What do you think entire publishing experience means?
• Is it what WordPress.com needed to compete with Squarespace, Wix and Shopify for a page builder type UI (not a bad thing in itself)?
• We all aim to revolutionise, but often it’s one/two people accidentally stumbling on something. This is building by committee. Procedure and revolution seem at odds.
• Would WordPress die without innovation in the core? Will lack of stability kill it and all its children?
• The controversial manner of Gutenberg’s release. Not keeping it as a plugin was a little unusual, and ratings and popularity of the Classic Editor and the possibility that most people are using Page Builders.
• Miss-sold? Something to help Page Builders became something to kill them quickly.

Where it is and what’s coming?

• Block Editor
• Full Site Editing
• Developer support (after the initial gold rush)
• What happens to themes (many have just added header and footer editors)?
• Multilingual seems like an interesting idea

How to deal with Gutenberg?

• When do you jump in? Now, or when it’s all finished in 8-9 years? There are, at the time of writing roughly 700 bugs reported.
• What about clients? Can they cope with the changes?
• Are Page Builders at risk?
• What are the benefits of moving to Gutenberg now?
• The challenge will be keeping everyone onboard – the less it does the better the chance.

Conclusions:

David:

I would love it if all the things I expect in a Page Builder were natively in WordPress. It would bring everyone together. Today it is not even close to what I think my clients could handle, and for me I can’t see what the endgame is to even know if one day I should use it.

I am grateful to all who give their time to this. It is good to have another blog post editing option.

If it’s (what WordPress already calls it) a site builder, I think it is lacking and will not alone meet the needs of 2/3rd of WordPress users, but could cause issues for those who serve the rest.

I can’t think of revolutionary innovations that have come from corporate committee situations. My time in the civil service tells me they can’t innovate, but the are good at stability. In WordPress, I feel stability has gone. I don’t know what we get. The only thing is it is all open source

Nathan:

I think that the new Block Editor is far superior to the Classic Editor that we once had. I mainly use if for writing, and for that, I honestly think that it’s the best writing UI I’ve ever used, although I confess that I’ve not used all that many! The ability to move text around is just so very helpful, and ideas that you know are in the wrong place can be moved in a few clicks.

I think that it’s all about expectations and the fact that it’s been sold (intentionally or otherwise) as a possible Page Builder. Anyone can see that the third party Page Builders are better in almost all respects. They had a chance to finesse their products over many years, however they also came to market ready to go, which Gutenberg is not.

Automattic have some incredible goals for the project, and it’s being realised piece by piece. The problem that I foresee is that people want it to do all that it’s intended to do yesterday, which it won’t and they’re teaching their clients how to use third party Page Builder interfaces; and that’s going to be a really big hurdle to overcome, getting all those people to learn something new even though their current tools is working just fine!