Zebulan Stanphill

Update: turns out a colleague had disabled the plugin without notifying me, so unfortunately, the issue isn’t fixed after all. We’re trying out different ip-blocker plugins now. Sorry I couldn’t figure out the issue.

There were no other messages in the error log that accompanied the aforementioned warnings, so I decided to wait a bit and see if further updates would fix the issue. Thankfully, after the most recent batch of updates, the warnings have ceased. So whatever the issue was, it’s fixed now.

@jdembowski Thanks for the tip! ??

I have re-done the review, since a lot has changed in the past 3 and 1/2 months.

Here is the original review:

A lot of people do not understand Gutenberg, it seems. Perhaps that is partially the fault of the WordPress team for not being very clear on their plans from the very start? Perhaps it is also because Gutenberg is not really an easy thing to explain.

Most people expect all the features of the popular page builder plugins to be present in the version of Gutenberg that ships in WordPress 5.0. However, that is not the point of Gutenberg. Gutenberg is intended to provide a strong core that will, in the long run, be capable of everything the page builder plugins can do and more, while also solving many problems with building websites using WordPress.

What do I mean? Well, consider this.

There are a lot of page builder plugins. They all have different APIs and backend code, with modules/widgets/whatever-they-call-them that work only in their builder, and nowhere else. The page builder plugins have become a bit bloated, in some aspects. They not only provide a page building framework on the backend, but also a UI for using it, and many modules that can be used in it, but nowhere else. Want to switch from one page builder to another? Get ready to have to rebuild your content and deal with the loss of all the custom modules that the previous builder had.

It sure would be nice if there was a common API that all page builder plugins could use, so that pages could use any page builder graphical interface, but they would all share the same backend core APIs, and the modules would not be tied to a single builder anymore.

Gutenberg solves that problem. You may not like the Gutenberg UI, but you do not have to like it to benefit from the potential unification of page building that it could bring. Page builders would now be more compatible, and a lot of stuff that is currently bundled into a single page builder plugin could be spun off into something independent of any single builder, because it would be using the common APIs provided by Gutenberg.

But that’s not all Gutenberg will help with. Remember widgets? Those are pretty nice, but sadly, they have becomes pretty unused lately since they are usually only usable in specific widget areas created by your theme. You can not use them anywhere you want on your posts or pages, which greatly limits their usefulness. Some page builders like Beaver Builder and Elementor allow using WordPress widgets in their page builders, which is nice, but it would be even nicer if using them outside of widget areas was supported in core. Additionally, it would sure be nice if the WordPress widgets and the modules from any given page builder plugin used the same APIs and were not built with two completely separate systems.

And then there are shortcodes. Those work almost anywhere, but they are not a very visual way of adding content to something. And neither are widgets, though they are slightly better as they do have a UI, while shortcodes have none. And speaking of which, why are shortcodes and widgets separate? It would be nice if there was a single sort of… “block” or something that could be used anywhere and superseded both of them. Gutenberg solves this problem. Blocks in the Gutenberg editor provide a visual editing experience that is a lot nicer than manually editing the text of a shortcode, and far more flexible and WYSIWYG than a widget.

And then there are metaboxes. Some metaboxes involve things that are part of the main post/page content. These metaboxes will be replaced by Gutenberg blocks as well. Other metaboxes involve stuff outside of the main post/page content, and some of these will be replaced by things like the custom sidebar APIs that are being implemented into Gutenberg right now, while others will also be replaced with blocks.

But wait, if something is affecting content outside of the main post/page area (think author bio at the bottom of a post, the comments section, or the post title header of a page), then how can blocks solve this problem?

Well, as it turns out, Gutenberg will be able to edit areas outside of post content in the future. Not at the 5.0 launch, but it is on the roadmap. Gutenberg will eventually make it possible to edit not just the content of posts, but the content of your footers, your sidebars, the layouts of the post title, featured image, post content, and comments section on your website, and in the process make it possible to build a website without using manually-created PHP template files, and reduce the need for specific themes (or make them almost entirely convenient packages of premade layouts that could have been made using the Customizer and Gutenberg editor).

Gutenberg will provide a strong core builder system that will soon greatly enhance the WordPress website building experience, bring modular content blocks to the editor that are independent of any builder (like widgets did for sidebars, but with the ability to be used anywhere), and obsolete some page builders while turning others into extensions and alternative user interfaces for the core editor that all share the same common core APIs and prevent designers and developers from becoming stuck with any particular page builder plugin.

Will Gutenberg immediately do all of this at launch in WordPress 5.0? No, it will not. Gutenberg is being developed in phases, and the version in WordPress 5.0 will only be the result of the first phase. But in the long run, Gutenberg will change a lot about WordPress editing, and I am looking forward to that future.

If you can not use Gutenberg yet for whatever it is you do, then that is fine. You can still use the Classic Editor via the Classic Editor plugin, and you can still use your page builder of choice as well. In fact, Gutenberg does not mean the death of page builder plugins. If anything, I think Gutenberg will be able to make them more powerful.

Like I said before, in the long run they may adapt by becoming front ends for Gutenberg that look the same as they did before, but use a core set of APIs that allows you to easily edit the page in whatever builder you choose. Others may take an approach that is basically the same as most do right now and make their code pretty much completely separate from the core editor, providing their own edit screens for the WordPress admin that simulate what they look like right now with the Classic Editor. Still others may integrate (at least initially) with Gutenberg by creating blocks for the Gutenberg editor that are basically embedded instances of their builder. (That is what SiteOrigin is doing.) There are a lot of opportunities for integration and improvement.

As for compatibility, I am really not that concerned. WordPress 5.0 will load the Classic Editor if it detects a plugin incompatibility, and the Classic Editor plugin will be available to force usage of that editor when necessary. Additionally, Gutenberg has been continually improving its compatibility with metaboxes, and many plugins have been working to add support for Gutenberg. The Gutenberg editor even provides a Classic block that is basically an embedded version of the TinyMCE editor box in the Classic Editor, in order to ease the transition for older content into Gutenberg.

One more note I would like to make is that a lot of people think Gutenberg should provide every formatting option possible by default. But in my opinion, WordPress is supposed to provide a strong core that can easily be extended with whatever features you want. Gutenberg will allow that. Yes, you can not color text inline in a Paragraph block. (Well actually you can using the “Edit as HTML” option.) But you can just use a plugin that adds that option to the block. And perhaps if the plugin is installed by a large number of people, the WordPress team will decide it must be a greatly wanted feature and add it to core. But Gutenberg should not be judged by how many options it has by default. It should be judged by the core interface, the ability to extend it, and whether it provides good default features or not.

Since I have been pretty positive throughout this review, I think I’ll end with my concerns. I do not know when Gutenberg will be merged into core. I am not even sure the developers know just yet. Stating a hard deadline would probably not be a good idea, or at least not yet. Gutenberg still needs some polish, and it needs more user testing to determine which areas of the UI and UX need improving.

There has been some backlash against the idea of putting a notification in WordPress in the next minor update for users to try out the Gutenberg editor, but I feel like that will be necessary sooner or later in order to get a good sense of what still needs to be improved before the merge proposal. I would not want Gutenberg to be released too early and with too little user testing.

If I had to guess, Gutenberg will not be ready for a merge proposal until at least late May, and I would not be surprised if it happened in June. Development of Gutenberg has been rapid, and improvements have been a lot faster than you might think, but I am not sure it is fast enough to be ready until at least a month from now. The milestones on the GitHub page show several things that need to be completed before a merge proposal is considered, and it seems like they are sticking to that. They do not seem to be in too much of a rush to get the editor into core. I just hope there is enough user testing that happens between now and when the merge proposal happens. Of course, the WordPress 5.0 beta will bring tons more testers, but it would be nice if the majority of UI and UX issues are resolved before then.

Speaking of user testing and feedback, I recommend posting issues on the GitHub page for Gutenberg concerning the issues you are experiencing (whether technical bugs, conceptual concerns, or things you do not like about the graphical interface), as well as checking out and commenting on the existing issues. The best way to have a say in what is going on is to go there and say something.

https://github.com/WordPress/gutenberg/issues

Finally, I would like to make a note about the star rating I chose. If I were to rate this based purely on what the plugin does right now and this very moment, I would give it 3 stars. But I can not act like this is all that Gutenberg will ever be or all that is currently planned to be. The Gutenberg project as a whole is a lot bigger than what this plugin does right now, and I will not be able to rate later versions of Gutenberg after it gets merged, so I am rating it right now with the understanding that this is a beta plugin for the first phase of a huge long-term project that I think will revolutionize how people build websites with WordPress. And as the first step of something as big as this, I think this is really well done. The biggest issues it has are user interface and user experience problems that require a lot of user testing to fully resolve, and the odd bug here and there that is being worked on and is to be expected from a beta plugin. The core concepts, plans, and extensibility of the project are great, in my opinion.

Well, that is what I think of Gutenberg. I hope my review was helpful and insightful for you.

@atomicblocks I was referring to the styles API recently introduced to Gutenberg and used by the core Quote and Separator blocks:

What’s new in Gutenberg? (30th July)

https://github.com/WordPress/gutenberg/pull/7362
https://github.com/WordPress/gutenberg/pull/7997
https://github.com/WordPress/gutenberg/issues/7551

The default styles could be made to use this API so that themes could add additional style variations and users could switch between them using a nice interface with previews.

Actually, I did not realize it had only just been released in 3.4 a couple days ago. I have been building the plugin from the master branch on GitHub for the past month or so and I guess I lost track of what was in the public releases. ??

@lukefiretoss

Yeah, those are pretty neat (and should definitely make using and extending those builders a lot easier), though those APIs did not exist until just recently, and the two APIs are of course separate and incompatible with each other, meaning if you develop for one your work cannot easily be carried over to another. Ideally, I am hoping that the Gutenberg project will result in a common API that is shared across all page building in WordPress, with plugin-specific APIs on top of it that exist for things specific to a particular builder plugin, like how options are visually presented in the UI of a particular builder interface, or support for features exclusive to a particular builder… a common API built off of Gutenberg could also mean plugins that add blocks that work in all builders, but also have good integration with the interfaces and unique features of multiple different page builder plugins which do not have an equivalent in the core editor and APIs.

@kittyridge

I get what you mean, but I think Gutenberg can be put into core before being completely finished, while also not being a disjointed prototype, due to it consisting of multiple components. The first component (the block editor in the context of editing the content of a post or page and the edit-and-publish experience) can be implemented before the others, as long as it is itself polished enough for production. Gutenberg does not have to replace everything before it gets merged into core. Right now, I think the idea is to simply replace the current editor.

What the Gutenberg project needs to accomplish in WordPress 5.0, in my opinion, is to replace the Classic Editor without losing any useful functionality, while also maintaining a good amount of backwards compatibility to ease the transition into the new content-editing experience.

If I am remembering correctly (correct me if I am wrong), it is planned that if an incompatibility is detected between Gutenberg and a plugin while loading a post, the Classic Editor will be loaded instead. This should help with some of the more extreme incompatibility cases.

Additionally, opening an old post in Gutenberg puts everything in a Classic block, which has been made to essentially be an embedded instance of the TinyMCE editor box. This means that people who use plugins that add buttons to the TinyMCE editor will still be able to use them in Gutenberg if they do not convert the Classic block to standard Gutenberg blocks. This should make transitioning into the new editor a lot easier. Interesting to note, the Classic block is not technically an actual block. It does not have any corresponding HTML comments to represent where the block starts and ends. The way it works is that any content in post_content that is not inside a block is treated like legacy content (which in most cases it probably is).

And then there is the metabox support. I think this is the part that needs the most improvements. Ideally, the majority of metaboxes should work perfectly in the Gutenberg editor. As it is, a lot work decently, but there are still some bugs and quirks here and there. I am glad the development team has managed to improve how they handle metaboxes over time (thankfully they are not using <iframe>s anymore), and I hope they will be able to continue improving it as they near release.

And then there is the Classic Editor plugin, which should solve pretty much every remaining compatibility issue, albeit with the need to go and install a plugin, which could be a hassle if it has to be done on a lot of websites. Ideally, this should rarely be necessary, and I hope a download link to this plugin is provided on the welcome screen of 5.0 for quick access.

Besides compatibility, there is also the task of making the editor feel intuitive and an improvement over the current one. Of course, there are currently several UI bugs that exist, but assuming those get fixed, there is still improvements that can be made to the UX and UI, such as making drag-and-drop easier to discover and use. I am optimistic that these issues will be resolved before the 5.0 release, though I could be wrong. (I hope not!)

Assuming that this first phase of Gutenberg is polished enough for the 5.0 release, then I think developing Gutenberg in stages will help the project a lot. Having the initial post-content-editing part of Gutenberg in core will dramatically help the design and development team to figure out what people want to be added or improved. (Of course, the project still needs to be good enough to be considered decent by everyone before it is merged.)

The phased development of the project will also allow plugin and theme developers to easily start taking advantage of blocks and the other initial features of Gutenberg right now, making it easier to adapt when the later features of the Gutenberg project are implemented. Of course, the Gutenberg APIs regarding the initial features should be relatively stable upon merge proposal, and right now they are currently still be revised in key parts, so Gutenberg definitely should not be released until that has been resolved.

@irishetcher

I am not entirely sure whether Gutenberg should be enabled by default or not in WordPress 5.0. Depending on how well Gutenberg handles compatibility, there may be hardly any problems, and so having it enabled by default would be just fine. Additionally, a lot of plugins and themes are working to add Gutenberg support, so that should help a lot with the transition as well.

I think a lot of this depends on just when WordPress 5.0 is released. Would June be too early? What about December? How polished will Gutenberg be by then? How much support will it have from plugins and themes? How many people will be affected by potential compatibility issues?

If you use one of the popular page builder plugins, I think you probably have nothing to worry about. Divi has announced that they will be ensuring Gutenberg compatibility, and I expect that for the first Gutenberg-compatible release, they will likely just load the Classic Editor screen when editing with Divi, making the admin editing experience the same as it is now, and the Divi Visual Builder will be completely unaffected. (They may also add a button to the Gutenberg editor to switch to the Divi editor… AKA the Classic Editor with the Divi Builder on it.)

Beaver Builder is already adding basic Gutenberg support in the form of a Beaver Builder block that is essentially just a link to open the Beaver Builder Page Builder, so it is hardly affected at all as well.

SiteOrigin is making their page builder into a block, meaning you will be able to use the SiteOrigin page builder within the Gutenberg editor, which is certainly an interesting initial approach.

Avada has announced that they are working to support Gutenberg, and I expect that they will do it in the same way that I expect Divi to do it… just load the Classic Editor screen to make it work the way it does now.

Elementor is planning to support Gutenberg in some way as well, and I expect that they will initially do it much like Beaver Builder, and will likewise be hardly affected by the first phase of Gutenberg.

The Visual Composer team has also announced that they will support Gutenberg, and you will be able to use Gutenberg blocks within Visual Composer, so that is neat.

If you are not using one of the page builder plugins and are instead just using the Classic Editor, then I think the biggest problem you may have is with metaboxes. Again, this is where plugin/theme support and polish before launch are vital. A combination of good metabox support in Gutenberg, plugin and theme compatibility, and the option of the Classic Editor plugin should, I think, be sufficient to handle most cases.

Overall, I am quite optimistic for the Gutenberg project, though I think the timing of the 5.0 launch and the state of the project and plugin/theme support leading up to it are important and should not be overlooked.

There are actually some issues open on GitHub repository about the ability to change the content width in the editor:

https://github.com/WordPress/gutenberg/issues/1483
https://github.com/WordPress/gutenberg/issues/5650