Nowhere Near Ready

The “block” structure is a neat idea, but in practice, it makes even the simplest editorial tasks incredibly challenging. Copy-and-paste, for example, often results in content being chaotically spread across a dozen damn “blocks”. Similarly, rich formatting is a nightmare, either being applied inconsistently or incorrectly, with no clear “fix” aside from manually re-transcribing funky data to a new block and manually deleting the old one.

A workflow win this isn’t. Haha.

UX inadequacies aside, Gutenberg’s affect on general WordPress Core development has been disheartening. Though used by a quarter of a billion web sites worldwide, the number of developers actively working on the Core itself is quite small and disorganized by Open Source standards. WordPress does not have the resources to develop a project of this magnitude, let alone develop it safely. In departments like Core Media, Gutenberg has essentially required that all unrelated efforts — including security issues, bug fixes, and achievable progressive enhancements — be placed on indefinite hold. And what’s worse, the lack of resources has inevitably led to a lack of review, allowing a startling number of compatibility-breaking changes to sneak into the Core. The amount of damage this will do to the overall ecosystem is hard to fathom.

I can only hope that someone at the top of Automatic will step in at the last minute and decide that Gutenberg is more appropriate as a plugin than a Core feature.