Please, for the love of God, don’t!

If I could, my rating would be -2 stars.

I know I can’t speak for everyone in our company, but for the love of God, do NOT enforce Gutenberg on us. It should be optional, opt-in, preferably completely uninstallable, removable.

The good:

For the “I want a website for my hobby” people, Gutenberg is fabulous. It is a very, VERY nice way to create content.

The bad:

But WordPress is not just for those people.
WordPress is the basis for a LOT of websites that are designed by professionals, built by professionals, tailor made for the customer.
For those professionals, having a fully customisable wysiwyggy editor is NOT GOOD.
For the customer; it is HELL. They don’t want to place a header-block here and a text-block there. They want to enter content in the, and not worry about the layout; that’s what the designers and developers created the templates for.
O.k., some customers want to use a page-builder, but most don’t.

Sure you CAN build any site with Gutenberg, but while you were so busy wondering wether you COULD, you never stopped to think about whether you SHOULD.

The ugly:

Take a little example.

Today, the customer wants a paragraph with a specific style on the bottom of every page. Today, we create a meta box, have the customer enter the text, and the template outputs the content correctly. 1000 pages are created.
Next month the customer decides, this should be a blockquote, not a p.
1 (ONE!) edit in the template changes the p to a blockquote an the entire site is done.

Now, Gutenberg

we created a block in javascript (?! the f why) with

save: ( props ) => {
    return el( RichText.Content, {
        tagName: 'p',
        className: props.className,
        value: props.attributes.content
    });    
}

Customer creates the same 1000 pages, in considerable more time, I should add! and again decides, that P should be a blockquote, so we change to

save: ( props ) => {
    return el( RichText.Content, {
        tagName: 'blockqoute',
        className: props.className,
        value: props.attributes.content
    });    
}

Guess what!
every single one of this 1000 pages has to be edited, each one giving an error on the block.

Tell me, please, wise men and women of the WordPress developer team, please TELL ME IN WHAT UNIVERSE THIS IS A GOOD THING!

This is developer HELL. I guarantee you, you will lose most of your market share with this, or will not upgrade to any version that enforces Gutenberg.

Again, I’m not saying Gutenberg is bad, on the contrary, it is a superbe version of any page builder I’ve seen. In my opinion, Gutenberg is not for the corporate side of the web, at least not just yet.

Maybe I’m wrong. Hell, I hope and pray I’m wrong! But as far as I can see I’m not. Gutenberg is the new Edsel.

Sorry.

^RP