Quite a bit of work to do to make developers happy, but they’re working on it

Per many recommendations and out of curiosity, I installed Gutenberg in a test environment, once to a fresh installation of WordPress with the twentyseventeen theme, and on another existing site with a custom theme.

I think that Gutenberg is a great option for people operating a blog and keeping the content area of their site only for basic layout. It brings presentation up a notch, which is nice. The amount of options for one to work with to improve the look of their blog is excellent, and I am looking forward to the expansion of those features.

For development, I’m not really sure where to start. This review is based on initial impressions and immediate transition from a custom theme to the integration of Gutenberg. I’m glad to say that when I installed Gutenberg, my pages didn’t drastically change on the front end; however, I am sad to say that editing the pages using Gutenberg is not an option. A lot of developers, myself included, utilize WordPress’s custom fields (ACF especially) to create flexible layouts. Being able to change the layout and use multiple parent containers/sections in a page layout is vital to creating custom layouts for user experience. Custom templates made with flexibility (consider ACF’s flexible content, for example) really enrich the experience. Recently ACF’s founder had indicated they will have ACF ready for Gutenberg, so I’m looking forward to that experience. My review score is for the current state of Gutenberg, which feels limited.

In terms of page builders and true WYSIWYG functionality, Gutenberg is neither one. Gutenberg is not Visual Composer. Truth is, I do not like Visual Composer. I always prefer zero inline styles, so page builders often are frustrating. On the flipside, page builders like VC or Beaver or Elementor do offer great flexibility and WYSIWYG functionality, which is why they are popular. Because I’m not a page builder person, I’d like to see Gutenberg allow for custom development per project. For example, one can create custom blocks (like using ACF) to achieve the individual blocks they’d be used to seeing on a WordPress site using custom fields. If this is in the plan, I’d love to hear more about it.

My review score isn’t one that is meant to just complain. I just think that making such a leap with so much unknown is quite concerning, and I hope that our properties will not suffer when the transition comes. I’m going to spend a lot of time in the coming months familiarizing myself with Gutenberg, and hopefully that will result in raising the score to five stars and being happy with how Gutenberg gets integrated into core. There’s definitely a lot of potential, and I appreciate the community’s efforts to move forward.

Update 2-28-2018
I’m seeing the needle move on this and have upped my review to three stars. There are working components on the Gutenberg editor page that now allow for custom fields and other customizations. This is making me more excited about the changes. I’m still uncertain, however, regarding how Gutenberg imposes on custom fields. Either way, I’m much more optimistic at the moment.

• This topic was modified 7 years, 1 month ago by jjcarlson.
• This topic was modified 7 years ago by jjcarlson.
• This topic was modified 7 years ago by jjcarlson.