They made it pretty for one use case, and unusable for all others

  • Gutenberg is a great idea that was carried WAY too far. It is an attempt to be a page builder that retains support for text-mode, but if you actually try to use text mode on anything but the most simple layouts, it quickly becomes herculean task.

    In addition, the new UI takes over everything, leaving no way to provide intuitive meta box/custom field support for additional data that shouldn’t be structured as part of the post body. This failure to consider use cases other than “blog post” becomes a clear theme throughout testing.

    For example, the Devs have made it clear that Gutenberg is intended to replace our current editor TinyMCE objects, and the team only intends to support a single interface… but Gutenberg is worthless in constrained contexts like custom TinyMCE metafields, or settings pages.

    For post types without an editor, Gutenberg has been molded far too tightly into the entire interface to intuitively strip it out and leave a logical interface.

    Gutenberg tries to be a page builder, but hasn’t tackled the most commonly requested feature of page builders… nested blocks. Without column and container support, it cannot be effective in creating page layouts, but even if they manage to add support for columns, the resulting comment mess in text mode will be as bad or worse than just including raw html… and far buggier.

    Their biggest flaw is the attempt to meld content blocks with the idea of post_content as both a structured single source of truth and also a plain-text representation for things like excerpts and search. Trying to be everything for every use case has made a terrible result for all use cases.

    Expanding this flawed concept into trying to blend tinymce content-editable areas and dynamically inserted html in a React-managed context leads to an extremely fragile, buggy result that fundamentally cannot be made into an intuitive or stable base for new developers to build upon.

Viewing 4 replies - 1 through 4 (of 4 total)
  • Plugin Author Tammie Lister

    (@karmatosed)

    Thanks for your input, it’s feedback that makes Gutenberg a better experience for everyone. I would encourage you, if you’ve not to have a little relook at the project now it’s progressed more. It’s not complete, but a lot more features and iterations have been done based on feedback.

    Gutenberg tries to be a page builder, but hasn’t tackled the most commonly requested feature of page builders… nested blocks.

    The page building side is going to come not within Gutenberg, but within the Customizer focus, after this one. It’s a huge task reinventing the editing experience and that was the focus for Gutenberg. This base will then be built on by the Customization focus, taking it further into layouts.

    Thread Starter gschoppe

    (@gschoppe)

    I intend to take a second look, but I have to say right off the bat, the idea that page building and editing with blocks can be separated into two different concepts is deeply flawed. If my post needs columns, it needs columns in a section, not a “layout”. If you have columns as an option in the editor, then there is no logic in duplicating that functionality in layouts. All that will result is that people will re-implement page builders as blocks, and if that use case isn’t intrinsically handled smoothly, WordPress will end up in the same sort of mess it currently is with systems like Visual Composer that misuse shortcodes.

    Plugin Author Tammie Lister

    (@karmatosed)

    @gschoppe forgive me for making it sound like they were being separated, that’s not decided yet. There the two focuses merge together is just like you say on layout. Be great to see what you think of the latest version, thanks for taking time.

    Thread Starter gschoppe

    (@gschoppe)

    well, I have returned over and over to look, and I must say my review stands. Relegating metaboxes to iframes is NOT an acceptable solution, as they are sometimes the primary interface for post types, and they should not be treated as second-class citizens. WordPress has always been defined by developer freedom, and forcing developers to shoehorn their ideas into the structure of Gutenberg blocks to get a first-class experience is unacceptable. Furthermore, a comment/html structure for gutenberg blocks is entirely the wrong approach. It ignores separation of concern, and leaves every post with embedded html that may be completely deprecated in the future. JSON is how you store structure. Dont reinvent the wheel.

    I find it incredible that a project that is this far off the mark is slated for merge in the next release of WordPress, and truly believe that such a merge would be disastrous for the developer ecosystem that WordPress’s success is dependent on.

Viewing 4 replies - 1 through 4 (of 4 total)
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