Third Time’s the Charm
Chris Lema shares why he’s fully committed to Gutenberg now. First and foremost, the answer is “speed.” 🐎
But it’s also “the way page builders allow you to do all the magic they do” without any cruft. Builders produce “a lot of extra container structure.” And Google decided they didn’t like it.”
Chris outlines his observations about Gutenberg, and he some good and some critical points. The kicker is how he ends his post: “This was my third effort at learning it. And this time it really stuck.”
Three tries is a lot — and this is from a receptive, highly invested, and very experienced member of the WordPress community.
There are probably many people out there who tried Gutenberg in WordPress 5.0, decided they hated it, and haven’t revisited it. Some likely never will, but I wonder how many could adapt to it with another pass. If your first-time experience with Gutenberg was its initial launch in WordPress 5.0, I can’t blame you for resisting change.
Eric Karkovack opined in Post Status Slack:
“The early versions were a big turn-off to a lot of people. And it’s going to be hard to get them back. It takes an open mind and probably some unhappiness with whatever editing experience they currently use.”
I tend to agree — either a negative experience with a page builder or frustration with the Classic Editor can drive people away from WordPress. Or, it might push them to the block editor. Another possible path to win back Gutenberg skeptics is a “cool” feature‚ like the collaborative editing slated for Phase 3.
Even if there aren’t a lot of huge Gutenberg fans, I believe the vast majority of WordPress users agree that the block editor and full-site editing are the future of WordPress. For that reason, we’re due for some critical thinking in the community — about what is possible to do now with Gutenberg and how to move the needle on wider adoption of it.
As Joost de Valk stated this week in Post Status Slack:
“[C]onvince people stuck on [the] classic [editor] and people [who] work with page builders that it truly is worth another try.”
