I’ve always been a fan of WordPress and what they do.  WordPress is free, open source, and really powerful.  It is also really easy to use and to setup.  There is a huge community behind it and it is my preferred choice of CMS for the websites I manage.  Many people criticize/look down upon WordPress, and I agree that it isn’t perfect, but it also doesn’t deserve the hate…even for Gutenberg.  Gutenberg is the next generation editing experience for WordPress.  It was released in late 2018, and is very (overly) “block”-focused and built in modern JavaScript.  It also is far from ready to be in production for millions of users.

I tried it

Since I generally like to use/play with new things, and I have good feelings toward Automattic/WordPress, I’ve been using Gutenberg for the last few months.  Today I switched back to the Classic Editor.  I’ve been trying to ignore/work around the bugs and quirks and poor UX stuff, but today I had enough.  No more random deletion/duplication of blocks.  No more laggy drag and drop.  No more trying to get the plus sign to show up but it won’t.  No more extra clicks.  No more blocks for now.

So many panels/popups/etc.  Ultimately, the UI is too busy and too buggy.

As it stands right now, Gutenberg is not a good solution for writing blog posts.  It isn’t all that text friendly and is just too buggy.  Where I do think it works well is building non-text heavy pages.  It is really just a page builder, this is where is actually shines…even with its bugs.

The developer perspective

From the perspective of someone who briefly tried to develop a Gutenberg block, I was frustrated. The documentation/training resources out there are minimal. Since the project is new and changing some of the earlier tutorials aren’t completely accurate anymore.  I’m also somewhat new to React and building things this way, so I’m sure if I was more experienced I’d figure it out.  (I also don’t like that create-guten-block is so opinionated, but that’s not the fault of WordPress.)  I’m sure I’ll try again, but at this point I’m not sure it is worthwhile until Gutenberg is more stable and polished.

I’m not alone

There are many examples of people who feel the same way.  There are even more people who hate Gutenberg.  It is the internet after all…

For the record, I don’t hate it, I just don’t think it is ready…and it needs some UX work.  I’m also not sure that everything should be in a block.  Until then, I’ll be waiting.