Thoughts on Gutenberg (Post-WordCamp US)

A follow up to my pre-WordCamp post about hesitations regarding Gutenberg. Blocks are the future, and I’m excited! Gutenberg and blocks will change the web, or at least 30% of it.


I write from the Frothy Monkey, a very hip coffee shop/bar/restaurant in downtown Nashville, with a Cynar and soda in hand (it’s too late in the evening for coffee). Today was Contributor Day for WordCamp US, and I am very proud to report that I contributed! Thanks to my pull request, dropdown selects for “Author” in Gutenberg will no longer cause a horizontal overflow (except the issue has now be re-opened…thanks, IE 11).

Back to the topic of this post (and the fact that I am writing it several weeks after the fact). Previously, I wrote Thoughts On Gutenberg (Pre-WordCamp US) where I outlined some general thoughts and hesitations about Gutenberg, the new WordPress editor, that I expected to change over the weekend. While those hesitations remain somewhat, I very much lean towards the sentiment of Blocks are the answer!!!.

Gutenberg introduces exciting changes for the publishing experience of WordPress, but more importantly, I think a move towards less monolithic themes and plugins, a more democratized ecosystem where-in websites become combinations of components or blocks.
Morten Rand-Hendrikson gave an excellent talk outlining the philosophy behind blocks and Gutenberg. I highly recommend checking it out here.

I initially planned for this post to have more thought-out and novel content, but things change. I’m now on a roll investigating options for using WordPress as a headless or decoupled CMS for an upcoming project – more on that soon!