Comment by easyThrowaway
2 hours ago
I'm still wondering who's the target audience for something like Gutenberg.
- A bastardized version of React whose state is stored in...HTML comments and WordPress shortcodes. It's extremely brittle and even simply updating an article can put its content into an unrecoverable state.
- Some components are done in javascript client side, some are done PHP server side, there's virtually no clear idea when to use which.
- It's incredibly developer hostile compared to basically any existing WordPress Visual Builder. We're at version 23.9 and it still breaks its API and behavior to the point of forcing full component rewrites (see the changes between Blocks v2 and v3 in WordPress 7.0)
- Its full editor capabilities are basic at best. The default components are incredibly shallow, and to get even a somewhat decent layout you're at the mercy of third-party developers, by that point you could've avoided many issues going straight to Elementor or WP Bakery.
- It's incredibly confusing for the end-users! The default behavior of the editing tools is to appear only when a block is selected, which is kinda difficult when the blocks themselves are invisible. Also, the "everything is a component" approach means that every paragraph, every list, every heading is a standalone gutenberg component with his own properties that could affect every other block on the page. Writing something requires constantly going back and forth from the "Component Tree" view just to make sure there's no empty components floating somewhere disrupting the page when viewed on a tablet.
It's...truly the worst of every possible worlds, and much of its issues are blatantly self-inflicted. I genuinely can't think of any reason to use it compared to any other alternative.
They were targeting Medium-users with Gutenberg, which in my opinion was a misread of the growth and direction of WordPress. Even after blogging died, WordPress was still always focused on being a blogging platform. Back in the early proposal/RFA days of Gutenberg, the debate between Mullenweg, the WP Core steering team, and most vocal of the WP development community was really whether there was this "silent majority" of WP users, or whether the software should cater better to developers/power users. Mullenweg, and most of the other core steering members, believed that the silent majority were interested in an easier WYSIWYG visual editor, and they used SquareSpace and Medium as the benchmarks. Even in 2017 this was kind of justifiable, online writing/publishing didn't really seem like it was being hollowed out like it would be just a few years later.