I’m not deeply familiar with development history so I have a question about attitude towards Gutenberg. As I understand there were many issues in early development which is understandable. But aside from that what are the reasons that many developers are critical of Gutenberg?
I saw and argument of backwards compatibility and breaking themes, plugins, but it’s not like developers will have to work for free to fix stuff, so what’s the problem?
Am I missing something or is it just a human nature to resist big changes?
Personally I’m excited that there is innovation in WordPress and we’ll have a modern editor as well as an opportunity to learn and apply React skills.
It seems to me that many WordPress devs view Gutenberg as a missed opportunity, in some ways at least.
The argument is that if we are going to revisit the WordPress editing experience in a way that could potentially cause problems for the ecosystem at large (plug-ins, themes), then why not take the opportunity to also address issues with the way that WordPress post content is stored in the database too?
People like Greg Schoppe have argued that the block based structure of Gutenberg could work really well with a universal, standards based, structured data format like JSON / mobiledoc. Instead, it currently uses good old HTML + comments.
I’ve seen other prominent members of the community suggest that a new wp_blocks database table would be a good option.
I think that people were worried by the announcement that Gutenberg will be the default in WordPress 5.0 and would require a plug-in to disable. A lot of small WordPress shops have many small sites that they no longer get paid to look after. If the sites were to break, the clients may not fully understand what caused the problem and could blame the person /people who built it and expect work to be done for free.
I personally am biding my time to see how the final released version of Gutenberg looks. I can see a future where WordPress themes just provide the base CSS and all of the reusable UI elements get distributed as plug-ins. Makes a lot of sense.
Just got to grips with Netlify CMS and I’m blown away.
I have no intention of completely abandoning WordPress, but I’ve been surprised by what can be achieved by a static site with a CMS.
I think this JAMstack approach could be the next wave. Take a look at this video, which explains how and why Smashing Magazine moved off WordPress and on to netlify. it’s an eye opener!
Netlify CMS looks pretty cool. Has anyone tried Contenta? Apparently it’s a decoupled Drupal 8 distribution. I haven’t tried it but I’m curious. I was able to go to DrupalCon in April and was pretty blown away by some of the stuff people are doing with that CMS by using it as a backend to feed other applicatons and services.
These were posted earlier in the thread but are worth mentioning again:
Coincidentally it turns out both of these lists are curated by Netlify.
