I’ve been watching this whole “Gute” situation for the last year or so and I have to say, what the fuck, WordPress? Gutenberg is a turd being polished shiny enough to overlook its flaws. It is NOT what the majority of users want.
I can see why the devs at WP think they need a Gutenberg around; page builders that permit users to use blocks to build pages and posts have been prolific for years now. Perhaps the most well known example of this is WP Bakery’s Page Builder, formerly Visual Composer. It has 366,000 sales on Code Canyon. I’ve got no less than five themes that came bundled with the builder. It’s seriously popular shit.
Gutenberg is not a page builder
WP’s own devs, the men and women working on the project, freely admit that Gutenberg is not a page builder. It is a block editor. Much like the so-called “classic” TinyMCE editor I’m writing this post in, it’s for text, images, and embeds.
Of course, the problem is that Gutenberg is the starting block of what will one day be a page builder that comes standard with WordPress. The goal is to tie Gutenberg into the Customizer to provide a real-time site editing experience. Not just content, but everything; the layout, fonts, colors, etc.; and no matter how often the Gutenberg devs claim the editor is just an editor, we know that’s not the end goal they have in mind. They don’t hide it.
What they do is deflect with claims of an editor when users groan about a inferior page builder being forced on them, then turn right back around and blog/comment that Gutenberg will be expanded into a page builder one day.
They do this while claiming WordPress needs to adjust with the times and that users want this new editor, while simultaneously ignoring the massively expanding list of negative feedback on the Gutenberg plugin and surge of installs of the Classic Editor plugin.
Talking out both sides of your face deserves 2 slaps
One for each of those cocksuckers. That’s right. Fuck WordPress. More specifically, fuck the devs who think their vision is what matters.
Once upon a time, their vision was important, even all-important I would say, but that was more than a decade ago. Nowadays, WP is a known commodity that people the world over rely on to solve a vast array of problems and serve all parties through the use of third-party plugins and themes – a market easily worth millions now. And maybe that’s the problem.
The role of Automattic in WordPress is getting smaller and smaller as the community innovates more and more, and cramming Gutenberg down everyone’s throat is a way to combat the behemoth third-party market. I’m watching Theme Forest and some very popular themes and I haven’t seen any of them introduce compatibility with Gutenberg yet. Not one, including the top-selling themes for general purpose and newspaper/magazine sites (The 7 and Newspaper, respectively). They’ve had a year to get started and still they haven’t even spoken about it, which I assume means they haven’t started on it yet either. Theming isn’t exactly a top-secret industry.
Bottom line and my plans to deal
I’ve tried warning my writers about the change, and even forced some of them to use Gutenberg on one site, but the resistance isn’t lessening. It’s remaining strong. Using Gutenberg doesn’t convince anyone who wasn’t already in its target market. We publish news and commentary, it includes images, videos, and embeds, and we do this A LOT. Gutenberg doesn’t offer a different experience for us, it offers a useless experience. It offers a complete change to the workflow of the famous blogging software, almost as if they (WP devs) believe they’re responsible for WP’s reputation as a CMS, which is solely attributable to the community of plugin and theme developers.
I will install the classic editor plugin and that will remain until we no longer use WordPress at all, if Gutenberg is merged into core as the default editor. I can’t continue to utilize WP if I can’t get a basic rich-format text editor without a plugin.
This new fork of WP called ClassicPress has a ton of appeal, but its potential is limited right now. WP is a total clusterfuck of code that ClassicPress devs will have to unwind and maintain to make it viable. I wish them all the luck in the world, but I can’t switch my production sites to it any time soon. I’ve tried every open source CMS/blogging software out there, even a few commercial products too (Craft being the most promising), and while I know that none of them offer the capabilities I need (WP doesn’t either), many of them will serve my sites exactly as they are now.
What seems more likely to me every day is that I will build my own CMS. It will match WP in a lot of ways, but it will add a few extra features for network use that WP could only dream of offering. It’ll suck dick, but it needs to be done.
For now: fuck you too, WordPress.