Simply unusable, and incompatible with other 3rd party builders. Please don’t include this in the core, keep it as a plugin. Nice idea, but seems like a disaster in the making for all my web clients and me using Divi and other builders.

The WP community is throwing a significant proportion of red flags about Gutenberg. Please listen. Let this cook for a much longer time as a plugin.

With other builders so well done and mature, I just can’t see how things will improve with Gutenberg, which doesn’t feel even remotely mature and polished. I can only see Gutenberg always being 5 steps behind and playing catchup to what other builders have already done very well.

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 Gutenber 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.

Would be possible to have the editor with 100% width of the contents area width, this way I can see my contents displayed in its full width of the front end content area given width, this also will help me when I build my own custom blocks so my users will see how their contents will be displayed while they are editing it in the editor

As a developer I’m seeing a lot of potential in its blocks.

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The new Gutenberg plugin is real crap!
Stay away from it!