The Reasons We Back Gutenberg for WordPress
For the life of WordPress, the visual editor has stayed pretty much the same. That was until the new editor called ‘Gutenberg’ landed in December 2018—bringing with it the biggest change in recent times.
For a CMS (Content Management System) powering millions of websites worldwide, such a change is a big deal.
Thanks to the Gutenberg update, it’s easier to make media-rich pages and posts for your WordPress site. Now offering features that will let you make high-end web pages in a snap, there’s no need to call in the experts.
With this new editor, WordPress is now better than ever. That’s our take on it. At Namecheap, we are behind Gutenberg because it’s what the Internet deserves.
Given that Gutenberg is still a hot topic, one year on, we feel that it’s time to make our case for supporting it. In this post, we address the reasons why we believe it’s the best thing for the entire WordPress community, from content creators to website developers.
But it’s not all about us. We also scoured the web to grasp the opinions of users and industry experts. Here we’ll show you their most common likes and dislikes, as well as give our thoughts on them too.
Before Gutenberg
For any readers unaware of what came before, here’s a rundown of the key facts.
Gutenberg:
- is WordPress’ new default editor. It replaced the classic content editor TinyMCE.
- delivers a whole new user experience. TinyMCE worked just like a standard word processor, whereas Gutenberg works by creating “blocks” of content. With this new interface, it’s possible to create more complex layouts without having to turn to a page builder.
- was included in WordPress 5.0 and installed on every new and updated WordPress site since.
- not only replaced TinyMCE but also replaced a whole bunch of other modules in the WordPress backend.
Why Was Gutenberg Necessary?
“Gutenberg is an important step forward for WordPress. Gutenberg enables WordPress to build content layouts, not just write articles. It is one of the many transitions happening in WordPress toward a more simplified user experience.”
– Zack Katz, WordCamp Denver 2017
To make some sense of Gutenberg, it is necessary to understand why it’s here, and what came before. Before Gutenberg, WordPress users could choose from an entire ecosystem. We had page builders, theme frameworks, and front-end editors. Each was created to optimize the site editing experience.
WordPress was in trial and error mode.
This ecosystem didn’t exist because it was the optimal way to build a website. All the shortcodes, page builders, and so forth compensated for WordPress’s shortcomings in fulfilling users’ needs. Thanks to Gutenberg, these foundational elements that WordPress lacked now come as standard.
This is why WordPress needs Gutenberg.
It’s as simple as that.
Common Points of Feedback
In doing research on Gutenberg, the following complaints about the editor came up time and time again:
- Fear of compatibility issues with plugins and themes, or issues with existing workflows.
- It’s hard to use and cumbersome.
- There was no choice but to adopt the new editor, rather than an optional switch from TinyMCE.
- It wasn’t release-ready because of bugs and usability issues.
And as for points of praise, people felt:
- It’s more beginner-friendly than what came before.
- You don’t have to be a developer to build pages with complex layouts.
- It has future-proofed the WordPress platform.
Gutenberg According to the WordPress Community
Many people have taken the editor for a spin. Since 2018, they’ve published billions of posts on millions of websites using the new platform.
What do they think? Unfortunately, initial feedback wasn’t great from an end-user perspective. Even one year later, it’s as follows:
To make sense of the numbers you see above, you’ll notice a clear divide on whether people like Gutenberg or not. Between the extreme positions (0-1-star, and 5-star reviews) there’s not much middle ground.
We can’t ignore the number of people that deliberately downloaded the TinyMCE editor to use instead. How can it be, that so many users choose to side-step Gutenberg in its current form? Many users aren’t shy about sharing their frustrations. Here’s a sampling of what they are saying:
A Divided Camp
There are noticeable differences in opinion between developers and those creating the content. Initially, the first group appeared more concerned than enthusiastic. The latter was, by and large, excited that the editor had gotten a long-overdue facelift, even if it still left a lot to be desired.
Today, it’s encouraging how many people view Gutenberg as the future of content production. Even so, there are many who still feel that their much-liked TinyMCE was unnecessarily taken away from them.
Besides the writers, there are those looking at WordPress as a CMS. Their biggest concerns were backward compatibility and a loss of flexibility. Some even feared that Gutenberg would break WordPress. As a result, many users called for making Gutenberg optional.
Some of those who build WordPress sites feared how their “non-techie” clients would embrace the new user interface, and expressed concerns about how to teach their clients how to use blocks. Despite that, many other developers welcomed the opportunity to use WordPress in a more versatile way and build on its features.
But all of these concerns were expressed before Gutenberg was launched, or immediately thereafter. To gauge the temperature right now, we dug a bit deeper into the conversation.
Favorable Opinions about Gutenberg
It’s not all bad on the review front. A number of professional bloggers and industry professionals had some positive things to say about Gutenberg once they’d road-tested the new platform. WordPress blog WPKlik posted an expert roundup six months after Gutenberg landed. Here’s a snippet of the opinions shared.
“Everything before Gutenberg felt like an outdated platform from which everyone wants to move away. Fortunately, Gutenberg gained big popularity in a very short time, and more and more teams keep creating and releasing new blocks with all kinds of crazy functionalities for the new editor.”
Pavel Ciorici – founder of WPZoom
“The future of WordPress Development with Gutenberg means developers can offer users even more flexibility and power in designing and laying out their content and sites. It’s exciting for developers because we get a modern development stack and great for users because you can now do more with WordPress more easily.”
Zac Gordon – creator of JavaScript for WordPress
“In terms of the broader WordPress development – the development of the platform itself – we’re witnessing a big user-first shift. WordPress is no longer about the “developer user”, it’s about the casual user. Whatever is being built in WordPress has to benefit the casual end-user, just as Gutenberg does.”
Karol K – Prolific blogger and professional content writer
“A huge number of site owners still have the Classic Editor plugin installed. That will likely decrease as Gutenberg improves. I’m excited to see how the way we build websites and create content will change. More specifically, I’m looking forward to seeing what great sites people will be able to create as a result of the new editor.”
Adam Connell – founder of Blogging Wizard
The views above largely reflect the positive voices regards the editor. A lot of people found the editor a change for the better, contributing to the evolution of WordPress. Introducing technology in keeping with the times unified how editing happens. There a feeling that with Gutenberg, we’ve got a truer connection between content creation and the end product.
Others welcomed Gutenberg as ‘intuitive’. It delivered a simplified experience compared to other visual editors. The shift from shortcodes to content blocks was another crowd-pleaser, as was the ‘modern design’ seen by many as beginner-friendly in contrast to what came before.
Unfavorable Opinions about Gutenberg
Many WordPress users, old and new, embraced Gutenberg. Unfortunately, there are some people who still feel the editor leaves a lot to be desired (in its current state).
Included in this list is Brenda Barron of WPMU DEV noted that she likes the new interface but doesn’t feel Gutenberg improves on what’s already available. Ultimately, she’d like to see Gutenberg as an optional plugin.
Josh Pollock of Torque, meanwhile, finds Gutenberg a step forward for bloggers and writers. That said, he doesn’t think it’s great for anyone besides content creators. Josh considers Gutenberg a step forward for bloggers and writers, but not so much for anyone besides content creators. While he’s a fan of the user interface (UI) overall, he fears backward compatibility.
The feedback above is a small snippet of this side of the debate. From what we gathered, two issues overshadowed the rest:
- Initial pushback with how the new editor works
- The wider implications of Gutenberg henceforth
About the first problem—people feel Gutenberg is making their lives more complicated. The new editor, they say, creates more steps to do the same things in TinyMCE. Treating each piece of content as a block isn’t intuitive, especially for things like bulleted lists and new paragraphs. The previous system resembled a word processor, which people were familiar with, and so was easier to pick up or to teach to clients.
Concerns also revolved around whether Gutenberg might affect WordPress’ flexibility. Some were concerned with issues of backward compatibility. There were those who believed Gutenberg could cause problems for millions of existing sites, plugins and workflows. Additionally, many felt Gutenberg was created for bloggers and low-level content creators rather than larger media and company sites, especially given the missing functionality apparent when the plugin first landed.
Let’s Talk About Those Points
As we know, the launch of WordPress 5.0 wasn’t entirely smooth. The amount of negative feedback has been rolling in, consistently.
Rather than focus blindly on what’s ‘grinding our gears’, a year after release, we should be asking what caused the main pain points, and what can be done to fix them.
- Resistance to blocks – While it’s tempting to say ‘resistance is futile,’ once you get past the small learning curve with Gutenberg blocks, the new editor does deliver on WordPress’ promises. If you master block-based editing, you unlock the potential to create far more complex posts and pages. With Gutenberg, we get a more powerful editor to create things that only technically-minded among us could achieve before without leaving WordPress or using special plugins.
- Missing features – Content creators are concerned that tools they relied upon are now missing. Writers aren’t pleased with a sudden lack of spelling and grammar support. Furthermore, the block system initially wasn’t compatible with the popular writing tool Grammarly (though it works well with Grammarly now).
- The ‘having to learn something new’ factor – For an editor designed for front-end users, it’s ironic that the least technically-inclined users are the most resistant. It’s hard to say whether this might be the natural result of change, or whether they are struggling to come to grips with it. Having used a pretty much-unchanged editor for over a decade, some resistance is understandable. With this in mind, a lot of people could be won over just by providing more robust tutorials for on-boarding.
- Keeping the plugin out of the core – One criticism was the state of the editor when it landed in WordPress core—specifically, that the plugin was nowhere near ready and that it needed a lot more work, especially with the user experience (UX). While many felt it left a lot to be desired, core developers are committed to ironing them out over time.
- Concerns over compatibility – The compatibility issue came up time and time again. While compatibility is an understandable source of frustration, any issues here are down to individual plugin developers. It’s not Gutenberg’s fault that they didn’t adapt their plugins in advance of the new editor, as the open-source development process gave developers plenty of opportunities to test their plugins against earlier versions of the editor and new version of WordPress.
- Blogger-centric – People were hasty in calling out Gutenberg as blogger-centric development for the WordPress platform. We’re of the opinion that it benefits everyone. According to Morten Rand-Hendriksen, a contributor to the WordPress project,
“Gutenberg is a foundational departure from the traditionalist view of WordPress as a blogging platform. It is a watershed moment for the application, cementing the idea expressed by Mullenweg in 2013 that WordPress is a platform on which anything can be built.”
“Right now Gutenberg is a replacement for the content editor, but that is merely the tip of a large iceberg. The concept of block-level editing will soon migrate to the customizer and eventually to the entire application. We’re already seeing this in Gutenberg in the form of widgets and post objects being included as blocks.”
It’s widely felt that with Gutenberg, WordPress is taking on site builders. The editor has transformed WordPress from a publishing platform to a site-building platform. In this sense, WordPress is moving away from being just a CMS for bloggers.
What Does the Future Look like With Gutenberg?
While Gutenberg is still a work in progress, its future seems promising. Since it dropped, third-party developers have created hundreds of themes and plugins that add to the power of WordPress. And, there is some interesting conversation regarding the potential changes and benefits to come.
In the Gutenberg plugin description, Matt Mullenweg, one of the founders of WordPress, said that customization is the end goal.
“While the editor is the focus right now, the project will ultimately impact the entire publishing experience including customization (the next focus area)”.
Mullenweg gave an update on Gutenberg’s progress at WordCamp Europe 2019, saying it’s only 10% on the way to completion. We know that many features are still being implemented. To quote Nathan Ingram from ithemes, it’s not fair for people to “criticize a half-built house because it’s drafty” — Gutenberg is only part of the way through a long roadmap to satisfying all users of the platform.
Adapting to Gutenberg is the Way Forward
The launch of Gutenberg wasn’t a home run for WordPress.
Nevertheless, we recognize that this change was necessary for the future of WordPress.
Within such a large, thriving community of users, some resistance to change should be expected.
We also would point out that Gutenberg is not yet finished. Noting that most early complaints weren’t actually directed at the fundamental concepts of Gutenberg, but with how the launch of the new editor was handled and issues with usability, we expect issues with Gutenberg will fade over time. Tweaks that enhance the editor, refine the UX, and improve accessibility might be enough to win over many of the loudest critics.
We have no doubt that the WordPress Core contributors are taking all of the complaints seriously, and are using the feedback as they plan future developments for the platform.
With all that in mind, we encourage you to be open-minded and try it for yourself. We remain confident that once they get used to it, most people will love how much easier it is to create incredible websites.
And if you’re ready to check out all Gutenberg has to offer, you might want to start with our EasyWP managed WordPress hosting. It will allow you to get your WordPress website up and running in a snap.
Gutenberg is horribly retarded and unusable. I will downgrade until they eradicate it. It’s a curse on real designers.
I agree. And the worst part was that they were kind of trying to force it down the throat of people.
I would assume, one reason for the lack of enthusiasm is the fact that No One knew how to use it, No tutorials, No beginners guide, no videos, nothing, nada. Almost a year later, your still hard pressed to find a decent tutorial on how to use the darn thing.
People using WordPress aren’t looking to learn something new, or having something they don’t understand thrust upon them. If Automattic had any sense, they would have prepared users with tutorials. The option to override Gutenberg with Classic Editor after the fact, shows many were ill equipped to handle the change. That also shows you were Automattic has their head, in the clouds.
NameCheap should do an article with links to tutorials, or write one, it would be much appreciated by many.
Thanks for your input. A tutorial might not be a bad idea except… Gutenberg is always changing. What started out as a content editor is now moving to theme development and functionality, with so much more on the horizon.
Still, your point is well-taken, and we’ll look into the options here.
Have you been over to the ClassicPress community? Can continue on with WP without fear that the editor will dsiappear and they are working as a group to improve it — without Gut. Everyone’s voice is being heard.
Yes, Gutenberg was not a home run. I was one of those that downloaded the classic editor plugin
I am adapting to Gutenberg, but it still feels like a clunky pagebuilder that was poorly thought out. I also find myself using the tinyMCE editor a lot as a block.
I also am using SiteOrigin’s Pagebuilder widgets and functions within the blocks. I am not sure if that is a good solution, but it is working so far.
Given all of the blocks that some creators are going to use to develop a page or a whole site, my big concern is site speed and performance.
and you should be concerned about more javascript in the browser, too. There are postiives to javascript no doubt. But browser-side code opens the door to more problems.
Thanks, that was a useful post. My issue as both a web designer and content creator is that I have been using a Block Editor plugin for years (Visual Composer), so Gutenberg in its infancy does not offer the kinds of varied options that Visual Composer does. I’m generally glad though that WordPress took this step and will keep trying Gutenberg with every new site I build to see if it’s developed enough to enable the functions I need.
Thanks for your feedback, and we’re glad you liked it. We’ll be discussing more about Gutenberg in the future, so stay tuned!
Small duplicate text error:
“Included in this list is Brenda Barron of WPMU DEV noted that she likes the new interface but doesn’t feel Gutenberg improves on what’s already available. Ultimately, she’d like to see Gutenberg as an optional plugin. Ultimately, she’d like to see Gutenberg as an optional plugin.”
Thanks for the eagle eyes! We’ve updated the post. 🙂
for now, I agree with Brenda Barron. Make it optional. Until I and my less technical clients who already struggle with technology, the blocks don’t work. they don’t adapt well to articles written in word or notepad so some people cannot figure out how to blog.
“it’s not fair for people to criticize a half-built house because it’s drafty”. It’s also not fair to force people to live in an unfinished drafty house against their will. I’m still not a fan of the blocks.
No one is forced to live in a drafty house when it comes to WordPress. If you don’t like the Gutenberg editor, you can download and install the Classic editor and things will be much the way you have always known WordPress to be.
It’s not truthful to state this without the caveat that Matt has already announced there is a deadline to its life. You give people the false sense of comfort that it is a forever deal. People are busy. They rely on truth to assist in their decision-making. The only way they can really be guaranteed to not have Classic editor phased out is to move to Drupal or ClassicPress or Joomla or another CMS.
In his State of the Word, Matt Mullenweg said the Classic editor would be officially supported until AT LEAST 2022. After that, continued support would be contingent on a significant number of people still using it. If most people are using Gutenberg by then, they may stop officially supporting it, but that doesn’t mean someone else won’t pick it up. At any rate, that’s a long time away in Internet time, so I wouldn’t get too worried about it yet.
Okay, I’ll give you that, but they did force us to at least visit the unfinished, drafty house. The less technical among us are still there, shivering. I went with TinyMCE Advanced instead, and just created one ‘Classic Block’ per page to hold all the content. This way, I’m still in the drafty house, but I have a cozy blanket.
You SHOULD NOT need to install an editor to be able to work properly with the site freshly installed. The one included should be the one that actually works and the “drafty” to be optional What you just said is like putting a square wheel on a car, that might work and give you a bumpy ride and saying, that you can change it with normal wheels if you don’t like the square ones. Those who are getting familiar with the square wheels will say “this is wonderful, it’s bumpy but we can go to a direction”… but those who were used with the old editor, with elementor or with the Visual Composer it’s totally a nightmare. Why the hell they didn’t adopted Elementor???
The question becomes: Is there a way to make more of us happy? AND.. why did the Gutenberg creators move forward without seeing how important training and collaboration and input were.. and still are? No one has to be sold on something if it is truly a step forward and more usable than what has gone before it. Ironing things out “over time” will leave a lot of us looking for ways around Gutenberg.
The developers of WordPress Core are doing everything they can to listen to, and address, the concerns of the WordPress community. But it’s worth noting that “WordPress” is open source software that is a product of the work of a huge community. As such, its improvements/changes/enhancements have always been incremental and are largely determined by who gets involved in its development. Likewise, much of the training and documentation about how to use WordPress also rests within the hands of the community.
If you want to understand more about how WordPress is created and what is going on with Gutenberg, it might be worth watching Matt Mullenweg’s State of the Word 2019 keynote from WordCamp US a few days ago. It might help you understand how Gutenberg came into being and it should definitely help to explain where it’s going.
I absolutely HATE it! I didn’t know it was called Gutenberg; an insult to the print industry.To force a huge change on people without any warning was the wrong way to go. ?
We get it, not everyone is a fan of Gutenberg (yet), though we believe that it’s the wave of the future.
To your critique, there was quite a bit of warning (including here on our blog), and WordPress.org made the Gutenberg plugin available before it launched so people could try it out and test it with their own site and process.
We will be publishing additional articles on Gutenberg in the future that might help you understand and appreciate where it’s going, and in the meantime, if you haven’t already done so, you can still download and install the classic editor plugin.
How does Gutenberg affect those of us who use page builders?
We will address that in future articles, but the quick answer is that many themes, including some frameworks, are already utilizing the blocks available in Gutenberg, and we expect more of them to do so in the future. How that impacts the users of those page builders and frameworks will depend largely on the theme in question. Overall, though, the idea is that it will put more control in the hands of the users and reduce or eliminate some of the design and functionality challenges that can exist with any WordPress theme. It’s still early, but we have many reasons to be excited and optimistic for what will come.
Using Gutenberg feels like forcing me to use a full-fledged publishing tool like MS Publisher when all I want is to write out an article in a word editor like MS Word. The very idea that I have to create a block to type a title is mind-bogging. I feel that WP is going in the wrong direction and will lose itself (and users) as it tries to do it all. Think why Apple products succeeded so well where MS failed: just a few options but well designed and integrated vs a hosts of “powerful” but cryptic choices that make everyone’s life so much more complicated. I already have a page design, which is not going to change until I redesign the whole site, so why would I be bothered with blocks? Maybe it’s good for those developing themes, but not for day-to-day blogging when I just want to get posts out of the door. I can’t be bothered with moving blocks around. There have been many blogging platforms before WP, and WP succeeded because it provided a simple, no-nonsense way to get blogs out quickly. Now, it’s introducing complexity for no reason. Use blocks for a publisher editor, use a simple editor for posts. If WP continues on this path, somebody will come up with another simple way to blog.
5 million + installations of Classic Editor don’t lie. Put it back to optional and quit messing with something that didn’t need fixing.
Classic editor was solid, but it obviously needed to be modernized. Too bad Gutenberg fell way short against other options already out there. I found it confusing and frustrating and it clearly wasn’t ready for primetime. It’s not that I’m resistant to change, I just don’t have time to waste struggling with a sub-standard editor. When I choose to use a block builder, it’s probably going to be Elementor or something more robust and packed with features. If WP would have just kept both and let people choose to use it over time, the launch would have gone much better, but that ship has sailed and people hate it.
Your comment totally makes sense, and not everyone is (quite) ready for blocks – though with the changes coming, more people may be getting on board within the next few months. However, if you don’t care for the Gutenberg editor, you’re always welcome to reinstall the Classic editor as a plugin.
5 million + sites have already installed Classic Editor. Yet 250k of Gutenberg (assuming before it was forced upon everyone? Perhaps?). Numbers don’t lie!
You say it’s the least technical that have an issue with it. But that’s not right at all. There are so many missing buttons on the front end that techies used every day and are now almost impossible to find. I’m talking about moving easily between WYSIWYG and raw HTML. It reminds of the dreaded Microsoft Ribbon. One day you can find it, the next it’s somehow disappeared. Everything takes more clicks too. To add a featured image I have to select a tab, then add it, then do something else before I can see the publish button. And sometimes it’s just so hard to even find the publish button. Maybe I should go watch a tutorial, but at least all these things were right there in front of you in the old version, no wonder people think it’s a step backwards. All they need to do to make me change my mind is add the buttons we were used to back to the front end GUI and all will be forgiven.
Gutenberg is terrible, forced upon and deserves the rating it gets. I switched some of my sites to classicpress a while back. I also see the image above kinda cherrypicks a sweet spot in the reviews, a more accurate image with mostly one stars would make more sense.
I have gone to ClassicPress also. What I like over there is that the community is so welcoming, friendly and open to everyone’s suggestions. It’s a totally different world from what Matt has created. The WP forum support has gotten a real sense of righteousness that I find quite offensive. No one needs a hard day working online to be further complicated by bristle at WP support forums or to have to spend days making zero dollars trying to learn the deep end of JS/React in order to work on our own company themes.
I think my primary criticism about Gutenberg, is that (at least for now) it is much more painful to simply write in (both in terms of understanding what to do, and actually doing it). While WordPress is certainly much more than a blogging platform, a LOT of people still use it to publish content, typically resembling blog articles.
To that end, it seems a solution in search of a problem… the problem Automattic was facing in terms of competition from other services that have site-builder type interfaces. Most of us on the dot-org side of things have been using (when needed) site-builder systems orders of magnitude more advanced than Gutenberg for many years. Of course, those are from 3rd parties, so that probably wouldn’t work well for Automattic as having it in-house.
I’m not opposed to WordPress having more native page-building (competition is good, so long as we can continue to use other options, or even use Classic Editor), but most people I’ve worked with (on their websites) as well as my own sites, don’t do all that much day-to-day page building. We/they primarily add content to a site that was page-built at some point in the past, either by a developer or using a 3rd-party page builder. Gutenberg – again, at least so far – just gets in the way of efficiently adding content.
Maybe one day, Gutenberg will get as good at typical page editing as TinyMCE. But, right now, it just feels like a kludge-job…. for, again, the primary things people do with their websites. Not good. (Yes, we can switch to Classic Editor, but support for that ends in a few years, right?)
“it’s not fair for people to “criticize a half-built house because it’s drafty”
Fair enough, but who wants to live in a half-built house?
I didn’t ask for a built-in WordPress block editor. None of my website clients would even look at something like a block editor. It’s beyond ‘don’t have time to figure this out.’ They want to add simple content, not build pages. How is it an improvement if things are now more complicated. Some things I’ve done easily for years I can’t even find let alone figure out how to do in the new block editor. If I hadn’t installed Classic Editor on all of my existing WordPress sites I would lose clients.
I thought the philosophy of WordPress was to have core do only what it had to do, and everything else would be done by external people who want to build themes, make theme builders and add features through plugins. It seems like a personality split has occurred. WordPress now wants to replace all of these people by creating an MS Office-like application that does everything itself. Where will it go? Install files of 500+ MB??
It’s more concerning because the process so far has gone poorly. Poor decisions. Poor rollouts. Poor features. Missing capabilities. Bugs. It’s like someone is trying to convince me to use DOS again instead of Windows 7 or 10!?! Why would I choose a weak, buggy and capability-missing replacement for all the themes, builders and plugins I use now that work great? It’s like WordPress thinks it’s leading us down this great path without once bothering to look over their shoulder to find out most of us aren’t following. We like the paths we’re already on. WordPress is like the salesman trying to sell me something I didn’t ask for, don’t want or need.
All the things I use have worked great for years. The minute the new block editor is enabled I find myself spending most of my time dealing with theme and builder errors. Who in their right mind would shove something out and expect that everyone who has built great things for WordPress for years now needs to learn how to make their perfectly fine-working, popular features some other way to be compatible with something obviously far less advanced and buggy?? Seems arrogant and disrespectful to other peoples’ time to say, ‘you had plenty of time to recode your plugin/theme/builder to work with our awesome block editor.’
My confidence that WordPress is a great, long-term choice for building client websites has been shaken by this apparent philosophical shift the past couple years. Seems like a significant regression backed by poor thinking. Having to backpedal so much should have showed people capable of recognizing you’ve made a real mistake that they have to reconsider they’re thinking. It doesn’t look like that is happening. It looks more like the people making these decisions think they know exactly what I want, and without once asking me if they go it right… I imagine they’ll pat me on the head and say, “you’re welcome” instead. Wouldn’t be surprised if they’re offended that I’m not telling them what a great job they did even though they nade changes I didn’t want or need, and doing a poor job to boot! Maybe instead of calling it Gutenberg, they should call it New Coke?!?
I’ve generally avoided Gutenberg in my implementations because editors such as Beaver Builder and Elementor are so many light years ahead of what it can do. As an agency I want to be able to have maximum flexibility in created content and not let editors destroy the layout and styling. Putting in something like Advanced Custom Fields in between beaver builder and the page content has been amazing for us and it still allows us to have blocks while having a rich editor interface/options.
So you support the elimination of what is the middle class of developers in the WP environment? That is what this boils down to. There are thousands of people who do not know advanced JS or the React Library and do not have the business time to spend not earning dollars and mastering the new skills needed. Yes, we need to be evolving. However, this isn’t evolving. It’s the ramming of an asteroid onto a development community that is the very group responsible for the big-time usage of WP. Small accounts with little money use the builders. Now the middle group can use a new UI without need for more advanced developers. That leaves enterprise. There are many of us who have mastered html, CSS, php, and as much JavaScript as we have needed to build interactivity. This is a business move by someone who could care less how he or his company impacts huge swaths of people — kinda like the gentrification of certain areas. I have lost all respect for Matt and only know his net worth is his concern far more than that of users. I have one foot in WP until the editor is phased out, am moving more and more into ClassicPress and continue to build in Drupal. Who knows where I’ll be in a year. But it won’t be with Gutenberg — the perception Matt has created in me with how he has handled people since 2018 is behavior and attitude that I just cannot forget.
I hope you add ClassicPress to your click/install CMSs. They are doing their best to improve on WP, keep moving it forward with improvements, without resorting to the React components UI — or the inherent hackability of JavaScript running on the browser-side and spitfire rapid changes in React that are accompanied by little documentation.. Plus — the community there is a breath of fresh area. I felt like I had left a dictatorship. That, in and of itself, is worth it as life is short.
It’s great that you’ve found an alternative. That’s the beauty of open source software – people can always build upon existing software and create something new that works better for them. That’s how WordPress got started, after all.
People who really use WordPress, I mean really use it, not just type in a title and some text and hit post, will never agree to an editor like gutenberg when you have SO MANY OTHER BETTER OPTIONS. One of them is TinyMCE. I get it, it’s modern, it’s clean, yadayada. WordPress has become so much more than just a blogging platform. For a blogging platform yea, Gutenberg will work. For anything more, no thx.
As I will explain in an upcoming article, Gutenberg was created specifically to allow WordPress to grow and not be seen as just a blogging platform. And as someone who has used WP for many years, in a variety of capacities (including creating rudimentary themes and building websites, as well as managing content), I love Gutenberg. Mind you, I’m not trying to develop themes using it, but as the features increase, I’m guessing I won’t ever want to.
I’m a developer and am currently customising Gutenberg for the way we’ll use it in my organisation. Doing research into Gutenberg and seeing its roadmap has me excited about what’s yet to come. I’m also looking forward to building my own custom Gutenberg blocks.
I like the fact that it gives developers a modern development stack, and that WordPress offers an API that makes it easy to add new blocks and even extend the functionality of the default blocks! Their handbook is probably more advanced now than what it was in the beginning, so I get why others may have been dissastisfied with it before, but it really has grown and come a long way since it’s inception.
As for the fact that it’s not intuitive to create individual paragraph blocks and lists, etc, I also agree. That said, in the Gutenberg FAQ, I learned that they have a Classic block so users can still make use of the Gutenberg features but also take advantage of classic editing features. To me, that’s a win-win! I think the block is also there for backward compatibility for posts, so I hope users can rest assured about that! I didn’t see it mentioned in the article (forgive me if it was!) but it might be nice to include that to that to help with the adoption of Gutenberg, so that users will know that there’s an alternative to just using the Classic editor plugin.
Thank you for your article!
Developing for Gutenberg is a real nightmare. There is no clear guide, a simple dumb block to enter a text area requires hundreds of lines of code, you got to know a lot of new stuff, the UI is a mile away from modern pagebuilders (f.eg. SiteOrigin’s or Elementor’s) and the metabox displayed on the side or on the bottom just another bad UI example (since there’s no way of throwing them away). Gutemberg is only an attempt to make WordPress more WIX-ish or Squarespac-ish but guess what? Those systems does not allow full-featured and free access to all the settings needed to make a proper website. WordPress is mostly used by professionals and one of its strength is being a CMS and not a blog platform: Gutemberg is just one step backwards from the right direction, that’s the one that made WordPress great and allowed many people to come close to coding. Simple code that just works, not the most efficient one, but understandable. If they wanted to build another pagebuilder (which by the way saves its contents in the database tables with shitty comments – hello pseudo XML) they just had to choose which one to copy from.
The Gutenberg resources provided by CSS-Tricks might be helpful to you.
I’ve done a talk on how to build blocks in Gutenberg , it really isn’t that a bad it is just developers don’t want to learn React. They would rather stick with JQuery which is slow!! Blocks are the future and always were as seen by Divi and Elementors success. Now WordPress has ran in-house block editor which negates these other visual builders.
Gutenberg is awful. I disable it as a default on any new install of WP. The arrogance of including that mess in core is insulting. For me, it’s just meant more work and aggravation. If I could delete it entirely, I would.
I COULD NOT log onto this without using Chrome Incognito. I even set Ad Blocker to allow ads here. WHAT is that about??
I HATE Gutenberg! Today, with an update, I LOST a site’s formatting! My sliders are gone. The layout is gone. It’s a mess. TEN years making dozens and dozens of sites and layouts. First time that happened!
Next, the autosave msg COVERS the formatting toolbar. You can change the default time, but WHY must we see it? ALL THE TIME?
Next, why HIDE HTML vs Browser view? FOUR keys to see/hide. FOUR KEYS? I LOVED the simple tabs.
THOSE two things NOW make it MUCH longer to do a simple post!
Plus, just to see all the fields on the right side, category, tags, featured image, NOW those are by default hidden. ON EVERY POST AND PAGE.
Gutenberg should be a plugin cos guess what, I prefer Elementor.
Elementor is MUCH more user friendly, with tons of built-in design features.
The programmers who shoved this down our throats are so outta touch with REGULAR folks.
Remember, it’s REGULAR folks who use this, not the designers who hit and run.
IF I had the money, I’d switch to Squarespace so fast WordPress would be eating my dust!!
THIS is a great incentive to make money and ditch WordPress after a decade of preaching it, encouraging folks to use it, and I feel betrayed, abused and used.
This is my short version. I’m busy and just saw your email and thought I’d read why you are behind Gutenberg. WordPress is NOT supposed to be for programmers!!! It is software to allow ppl to share info. REGULAR people. And I’m far more techie than 99% of the world. OMG.
ALL the stuff you are writing, from comment responses to the post, IGNORES THE FACT that USERS HATE IT!
IF Automattic and Matt want to turn this into another Drupal, Joomla, high end only programmer access platform, they and you are succeeding. If you want to help Wix and Squarespace especially, and lose hosting customers, mission accomplished. I am not being snarky.
I have taught tons of computer apps, from MS Office to Photoshop, and so much more, since 1990, still do. This is such a bad move for the majority of folks using WordPress. For all the reasons mentioned, ESP no support!! Mean, nasty stuff happening.
Thanks for sharing your feedback about Gutenberg.
In the most recent “State of the Word”, Matt Mullenweg acknowledged that Gutenberg is 20% complete, confirming that there is still plenty of work to do before it can express its full potential.
I see the growing pains, but I also foresee a (near) future where WordPress will be able to compete with site builders like Wix, Squarespace and so on, thanks to Gutenberg. The new editor appears to be a necessary step in the direction of site builders, and like any revolution, it comes with downsides such as possible compatibility issues with more mature plugins and themes, or a different user experience.
In the meantime, the classic editor plugin still allows anyone to retain the well known and well-oiled experience on their website, while Gutenberg’s team keeps improving the new editor. I’m pretty sure that a year from now, Gutenberg will offer a much more stable and mature experience, and the classic editor will quickly fade away, because Gutenberg will have fully replaced it with a better and more usable interface.
20% COMPLETE?? Who releases a product that’s only 20% complete??? That seems insane to me. If that’s the case than the incredibly negative blow-back is well-deserved.
I absolutely do not like Gutenberg. I download the classic plugin to my websites to overcome it. Maybe if there were a series of videos to explain it, but I’m not a developer or a tech person. And then I would have to take my free time to watch videos to figure it out when I can already use the classic version. There is no easy way to use it. One thing to keep in mind for the part-time user, who works other jobs, and who is not a full-time tech or developer, that part-time WP user only has a few minutes maybe to work on something. That person does not want to waste those few precious moments struggling trying to figure out how to use Gutenberg when the older version prior to Gutenberg was so easy to use.
First I had a similar opinion like most of the negative reviews, but it changed quickly when I really started working with Gutenberg. While Gutenberg isn’t perfect yet, in my opinion it’s a much better solution than all the page builder plugins out there. It’s great for designing custom websites and developing custom blocks which can be reused anywhere. Once the blocks are developed it makes the design process much simpler and the website more maintainable. No need to work with HTML in a WYSIWYG editor. There are still some UX issues, but it has improved a lot with the release of WordPress 5.3.
As a theme developer of course we are scared a bit because since 2013 we used theme options then jumped onto Customizer and have now provided compatibility with some of the popular page builders.
But in a way Gutenberg if it becomes reliable in near future and has pretty much everything a builder can do then of course as a theme developer our job will be made either easy or it will lead us to closing the shop because people won’t need themes anymore.
However i do feel WordPress should have taken a survey before implementing this major change. There were lots of other things where WordPress could have focused.
WordPress became the most popular web site platform cause it was more user friendly than Joomla or Drupal, etc etc.
The vast majority of WordPress users do not need the Gutenberg logic. They do not care to design their own pages. They are satisfied with a theme that has already done this for them and offers them some page builder if they wish to enhance their pages with more options.
The average user who has a small business and want to update content, does not need Gutenberg and it is complex UI.
The majority of the millions of WordPress sites do not need something like Gutenberg that make data entry a difficult task, the small business owner has no time, money or the skills to learn how to play with boxes.
I dunno if they will keep classic editor forever, but I see this whole thing as a failure.
I mean they do not improve their products, they just want to change it completely and aim for a different target audience moving away from the small business. This is simply self destruction in the making.
As for me, since WordPress decided to abandon me, I also look elsewhere for my web sites solutions and not rely on WordPress anymore.