A step back to a specilized CMS for bloggers

  • It seems Guttenberg is a step back to a specialized CMS for bloggers. Being a default editor, it claims that WP tends to be a constructor, not a development platform.

    For sure, we can still build projects on WP for some years, but each further update seems to lead us away from commercial goals to blogging benefits. Which is not relevant for a vast branch of tasks. That means pointless work in future: more tuning, more “oh, you can just disable it”, excessive functionality — loosing sense of choosing WP in comparition to clean frameworks as Yii, Laravel etc.

    Actual commercial needs:
    — Total speed increase (loading, input, reaction).
    — Predictability & consistency (limiting UI to a striсt design system)
    — Easy long term support (clean pure content in DB, standards, formal processing).
    — Easy integration (third-party services, external data, …).

    This list is close to a worldwide trends set by Google and other industry trenndsetters. So a large part of developers need a platform with less user-end customization: less scripting, less unpredictble decoration, less unreasoned “creativity”, which turns into future marketing losses and expensive support.

    The modern web-design is self-limitating. It’s not about “wow, cool slider”, not about “oh, let’s add some twitter posts here”. We expect content-managers to input clean pure content, which can be easily rearranged or even restructured in the future, even years after, as the world changes. That helps building flexible interfaces with great UX and keep them up to date. Limiting possibilities is a wise strategy for a vast range of projects.

    Gutenberg sets a different, opposing trend. It transforms WP into a kind of pagebuilder or consructor. Those products are in demand, yes, but they are not universal. It bring’s WP back to the past, when it used to be a “specialized” CMS for blogging. It crosses out last 10 years of progress. In fact WP today is a universal development platform for almost everything: shopping, sales, communication, branding and even service providing. It’s not just a blogging system any more. But Guttenberg claimes it is. Now we must be a Wix, whatever we do.

    I predict a lot of “fun” later, when redesigning and updating websites with 10K+ entries in DB, if each post has custom visual represention. It’s a blind gambling. You’d never know what was missed, lost or turned ugly.

    It seems, Guttenberg is not bothered by the cost of support, design consistency etc. It just says something like “Hey, bro, here is a sweet twitter icon for you! That’s the main option!”. No matter which social networks are really popular in our geographical region, no matter what kind of site we are building, no matter if this content tends to become obsolete in an hour. We are expected to be bla-bla-talkers by default. But we all are different, we have different goals and habits. Let us choose our ways)

    I think Goutenberg should be optional. Or WP shouldn’t position itself as a development platform for building apps.

    • This topic was modified 5 years, 9 months ago by Norske.
Viewing 3 replies - 1 through 3 (of 3 total)

  • Great Review – I can’t believe that this is supposed to be the future of WordPress. If you wanted to be a simple blogger, you could do so with simple standard WordPress themes. It was a lot easier to edit your text with the classic editor even as a blogger. A friend of mine, publishing a diary entries with wordpress, asked me what happened to WordPress – it’s so annoying even for the target group.

    Wordpress got the 10 year challenge wrong. You are not supposed to set back your business by 10 years, you should show your progress that you made over the last 10 years.

    Hi there @norske, thank you for your in depth review.

    Can’t the currently available block templates solve the problem you raise about “less user-end customization: less scripting, less unpredictble decoration, less unreasoned “creativity”,”?

    Thread Starter Norske

    (@norske)

    Greetings, @andraganescu. Thanks for your reply.

    Those block templates look useful for those who accept the block editor paradigm as a fact. But the problem is not about managing blocks. It’s about supporting custom page layouts created by content-managers. End user is not responsible for design issues, usability and future redesign difficulties. Yes, templates may be a nice workaround, restricting unqualified creativity. But I don’t need a workaround as I don’t need those blocks at all. Page layouts are sometimes based on usability researches and commercial KPIs. We expect CMs to manage the data, not the blocks.

    For now I keep ~4 sites ‘frozen’ on WP v4.x. (those are the most risky) and ~20 sites have complex fallback to Classic Editor. Experimental projects with Gutenberg showed 100% negative reaction from my clients even after 2 weeks in use. They find block editor too complicated and time wasting. They prefer filling 10-15 simple fields separated into 3-4 tabs then manipulating 10-15 blocks in one frame.

    In future I’d rather switch all those projects to ClassicPress, if that fork will survive for a year at least. Hope so. If not, I’ll probably offer my clients a migration to Drupal or maybe a custom solution based on Yii2.

    WP is too risky now.

    But thank you for your post, anyway!

Viewing 3 replies - 1 through 3 (of 3 total)
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