Explain why?

Hi Laura,

I’m sorry to hear you had a bad experience there. Would you be able to share some information on what exactly broke/didn’t work?

I know that many page builders integrate heavily with the classic editor, so they may in some cases need some updates to be properly compatible with the new editing experience.

As for your initial question, Gutenberg is made for WordPress 5.0, that has always been the plan and reviews do not affect this decision. What the reviews do help us with though, is getting an idea of what conflicts users may encounter, what does or doesn’t work for them and so forth. This is so that we can try to avoid any conflicts like the one you experienced, and also look at which flows still need improvements. It is done for the exact reason you mentioned, that there are so many combinations of themes and plugins, and the team behind Gutenberg can’t test them all, so we rely on the users to help us discover things that we do not experience our selves.

Thank you for your answer.

On this website the active theme is Hotel WordPress Theme | Monalisa Hotel, build with WP Bakery Pagebuilder. I am aware that you can′t test all themes and plugins on compatibility, but what most worried me is that users have a huge problem when authors does not make their theme or plugin compatible. New and/or succesfull themes/plugins are probably going to be updated, but what to do with the “older” themes and plugins…?
I maintain douzens of websites and really have no idea how to deal with this. Just teaching users the basics was already hard, imagine that we have to learn all again.

With Gutenberg it is not better, for simple things I need to click multiple times, mainly caused by the hidden controls.

What worries me is that you say

As for your initial question, Gutenberg is made for WordPress 5.0, that has always been the plan and reviews do not affect this decision.

In the past I tried Gutenberg already as a (beta)plugin and I read the bad reviews already at that time. How is it possible that when the majority is against it, it won′t affect the decision to replace the current editor for Gutenberg. I would like to suggest to open a public poll to see if this is the right path.

Although I understand your worry, decision by committee will never be a good way to move things forward, as there will always be disagreements. To be able to move forward we have project leads that make the final call on things. We believe Gutenberg will be in a good place by the time we decide it’s ready to release WordPress 5.0 (you’ll note there’s no release date set, that’s because we are intentionally leaving it up to the Gutenberg project to be ready before we plan any release around it, thus giving us time to weed out the bugs and make it the best possible version of it self it can be).

Most plugins will not be affected by Gutenberg, only those that interact with the editor directly (such as page builders in some cases). WP Bakery have already announced they’ll be compatible, as have the other builders I’ve looked into so far.

As for themes, nothing should change for them, they should work out of the box, the only thing is that they may not have all the fancy new possible styles (that make things look shinier, but are not required). If a theme breaks when WordPress 5.0 comes out, I can with an almost 100% certainty tell you it would have broken regardless (possibly not the most optimistic answer, I know, but I see no reason to sugarcoat that bit). We are working with backwards compatibility in mind though, so we do our best to fall back to the classic editor if something is detected as likely to break.

Now, where things -might- behave poorly is with custom work and specially crafted websites, and for them we’ve created the Classic Editor plugin that disables Gutenberg until they’re ready to use the new editor (and we are making it very obvious how to do so with the callout, informing of both options with it to help educate everyone).

I do hope that helps a little, even if not everything is super optimistic there are plans for the scenarios at the very least and I don’t think we’ll see too many problems when the new editing experience is ready for launch.