Hi, @lcazprof.
I haven’t been much of a developer in more than a decade, but as a marketer I use WP as a CMS for multiple clients, as a project manager I ask others to develop themes and customize WP sites, and –?yes – as a writer I use WP for blogging as well. I also work with a handful of other CMSes. Comparing WP with them, I still think the change Gutenberg represents is (over)due.
To address your comments briefly:
Maybe I have misunderstood, but I don’t think this is intended to be a “visual builder” as much as a content editor. I.e. it’s not Elementor or Squarespace (which I agree would be terrible), just the old post edit screen evolved beyond TinyMCE and the most clunky metaboxes.
As far as I can see, Gutenberg really doesn’t add or remove very much functionality. Screen options and some meta boxes are gone, but all the functionality seems to still be there. It looks most like an upgrade in how to add and work with things like headings and blockquotes –?which will make it easier for my clients (and yours?) to work with those things without tinkering too much with the formatting, juggling custom TinyMCE styles, having to go into the code view, use a bloated plugin with poor UI, or do other things that make content production complicated to do or easy to screw up.
I can not see where ?Gutenberg inactivates the page property ‘template’?. I’m not entirely sure what you mean, but as far as I can tell, you can still use page templates and post formats to wrap, style and present the content like before. Maybe you are confused by a demo, like the one I saw, without sidebars or other distracting content.
But at least on my test site the page templates still work as expected, and all the relevant classes were added to the body tag – so you should be able to use all the same css and js you’re using.
As for the styling: Why are you using inline styles?
Most blocks added by Gutenberg have easily understandable standard classes added to them (.wp-block-verse, .wp-block-quote and .blocks-quote-style-1, .wp-block-column, etc.). Also, the interface makes it easy to add custom classes to any block you want to style specifically. Combine that with body classes and templates (ref. above), custom blocks and options (ref. below), etc. for full ability to customize.
After all that, it seems like Gutenberg outputs exactly the kind of clean, semantic code you’d expect from a great CMS (which is head and shoulders above many/most crappy WYSIWYG page builders with their bloated code and randomly named classes and IDs). But it does not try to replace the role of the theme.
I haven’t tested Gutenberg with ACF, but Gutenberg seems to allow developers to create their own custom blocks, with all kinds of custom functionality, options, and fields. This seems like a great opportunity for Elliot Condon and ACF, as well as other plugin and theme developers, to create even better things than before.
In the hands of a good developer, I suppose Gutenberg might become and be used as a good, custom-built page builder –?but only if that’s the purpose. And it would still let you style all elements (or none, if you wish) according to the theme.
And while this is admittedly a big change to the post edit UI, I don’t expect that WordPress will allow much of anything into the core unless it is, to a certain degree at least, backward compatible with earlier versions of WP and the most popular plugins used by millions of sites around the world.
I am sure they are very aware that for years to come, a huge percentage of all content on the Internet will have been composed in the old WP UI, and they won’t want all those pages and posts to stop working when people upgrade.
Your fears seem based on an assumption that Gutenberg is being developed by isolated shut-ins who don’t understand what WordPress is being used for. I don’t think that’s true. In fact, it seems the team leads all work for Automattic. While they might not know everything that everyone is doing with WP, I think it is fair to say that they’re not completely in the dark, not entirely new to this, and not oblivious to the billions of dollars Automattic and their clients have riding on this being done right.
Who knows, maybe they’ve even made a few custom-built sites for clients themselves in their time? ??
But I might, of course, be mistaken about all of this, and about how Gutenberg is intended to work when it is finished…
