So Why Gutenberg?

So what’s all the hoopla about Gutenberg, anyway? The classic editor was working just fine. Why does WordPress want to change it?

Because WYSIWYG Wasn’t

Back in 2010, my sister Bev approached me. She and her husband had a website built for their propane business somewhere around 1999. It was getting pretty long in the tooth, but she really didn’t want to pay $5,000 to have it rebuilt, only to have to do it again x number of years later. Plus, they didn’t want to have to pay someone each time they changed their site, which was what they were doing at that time. Did I know of anything that could help?

Hey, Bev, have I got a solution for you! It’s called WordPress, and if you can do word processing and email, (which she could), then you can do this. So I rented some server space, downloaded WordPress, and we got to work.

She was doing very well, until at times she wasn’t. What she’d tell me was something like, “This is not how I expected that to look!” In other words, WYSIWYG in this case stood for “what you saw isn’t what you got.” And then it was back to the drawing board. I’m surprised the phone lines between Illinois & Arizona didn’t turn blue back then. I suspect they likely did, actually, we just didn’t hear about it.

The folks creating the block editor are trying very hard to make the WYSIWYG experience far closer to reality. In fact, the editor can adopt your theme’s styling (the setting is on by default in the editor settings panel), so hopefully those kinds of gotchas will be a thing of the past. Or at least a lot fewer.

Secondly, content creators often want to edit not just their content, but the various other elements of their site as well, such as the header, footer, and sidebar. The classic editor was never intended for that purpose. The Gutenberg editor is bringing this much closer to reality. Indeed, the whole object of the block editor is for folks to be able not only to edit and style their site’s content, but their entire site as well. It’s referred to as “full site editing”. It’s not quite reality yet, and it can only occur when a particular theme supports it, (the latest two WordPress themes do), but this is what the folks at WordPress envision as the future of its content management system. Please understand this class will only focus on Gutenberg’s content editing capabilities.

The problem for the WordPress developers is that it’s expensive, both in terms of time and resources, to maintain two code bases, one for the Gutenberg and another for the classic editor, which essentially, perform many of the same functions. A lot of talk has swirled around the year 2024 that the classic editor will no longer be supported. That’s in no way official–we don’t know how long it will continue to be offered–but its demise is coming sooner rather than later.

So, as w/the Gutenberg printing press, which didn’t help blind folks much, many of these features likely won’t help us a lot either. But the classic editor plugin is going away, so we’ve either gotta get on board or miss the train. Woo! Woo!