I hope you enjoy the video.
Let me know whether you think I’m talking rubbish in the comments below 😀👇
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Hi Jamie,
First thank you for your deep covering on Gutengerg evolution. You do a really nice job since the beginning.
Then, regarding the question Gutenberg Third Party Plugins heading in the wrong direction?, I have mixed feelings.
The biggest problem (for me) is the lack of the fondamental features inside Gutenberg right now, so inevitably there is an empty space for third party Gutenberg plugin, who are inevitably not compatible.
Let me explain the big missing features of Gutenberg :
– no good responsive design features – whereas 60% of Internet users are on mobile! Sure, there will be intrinsic design features but it will be in october in 6.1
– no local good font management (for GPRD and performances concerns). Again perhaps in October with font API?
– no good menu UX and mega menu features and UX. Perhaps a good UX in 6.1?
– little Flexbox and no CSS grids features
– no good dynamic content management for CPT
– no conditional templates or conditions (You must use CSS for the blocks you want to hide).
I also don’t understand your examples in the video. Avanced Gutenberg blocks are not new: Kadence, Stackables, Spectra are here since a long time. It’s not Cwicly or GreenShift who are responsable.
So for me, it’s more the “fault” of the – slow- Gutenberg project, rather the – quick – third party companies who just see big features missing and try to bring commercial solution. The project is very good (Kudos for the developpers) but it lacks a good coordinator/director and some good UX designers. Hope that 6.1 give us a response for the major drawbacks and important missing features. Sure WordPress is a “base system” that anyone can upgrade with plugins for example. But most of this ofeatures must be in core.
Don’t get me wrong: you do a very fantastic job, but I don’t understand the meaning of this video. Once again many thanks.
I must also say… the advantage of Gutenberg are mainly missed opportunities for professionals. It introduced an entirely new tech stack disregarding the existing developer base. It also should have gone with VUE in my opinion. apart from the ruff start it has produced a messy interface and inconsistent positioning of elements and panels. Then it rushed to a full screen mode that makes it even more confusing.
The worst thing is that its initial aim at only replacing TinyMCE is still felt in the simplistic approach of most blocks. I agree with others that the missing aim at professionals and dissonance between the Gutenberg editor and actual site isn’t helping either.
This sound all very negative and to conclude my stance is that the idea of unification is flawed from the beginning if the Atoms of the design systems are not powerful enough to build molecules or more complex patterns without bending over backwards.
This lead to every vendor invention it’s own Atoms and introducing incompatibility all the way up the complexity chain.
That said, one has to also look at the aim of these builder and block libraries. Are they ment to end up in the clients hands? In my case I avoid it. They are tools I use in my templates and parts of the page I build for the client. I lock them down before hand off and they will never see these options. Cwicly is recently also introduced such capabilities.
Hence, the client actually only gets the a (subset) of the regular Gutenberg blocks to write stuff with (tinyMCE replacement!).
I agree that using these builder or loads of base blocks on content or blogs traps a client so that is to be avoided, but that doesn’t mean I can use them in building the „template“ for the client that displays and wraps the content.
Thought provoking as always Jamie.
I don’t know if there is a specific answer in my mind though. Perhaps ‘a little from column A and a little from column B’.
When you add blocks to the standard Gutenberg interface and list view and then provide enhanced options for those blocks over and above the default Gutenberg blocks you are probably ok.
When a provider replaces the standard Gutenberg list view with their own interface then maybe they are pushing the boundaries of what can be genuinely seen as ‘Gutenbergy’.
Yes, this worries me as well. Don’t get me wrong. I see some interesting things happening, but I worry that we’ll end up with the same problem of mystery meat (as Matt so eloquently described it) that we had in the past. Is there anything in particular that worries you? For me, it’s the problem of confusing users when they attempt to do something, where native Gutenberg displays options in one place and in one way, and some new plugin displays it differently. What about you?
Almost did not see this video, as most of the time I get your content from yt.
What comes to mind is “with great power comes great responsibility…”
Before digging deeper into Gutenberg and FSE, I started down the path of Elementor. Fortunately, in my view, I stopped and started trying to simplify.
Part of what bothered me was everything with Elementor and plugins like ElementorsKit, was that they got you close, but then had some bits or setting that required premium. I’m not opposed to premium, but for what I am currently doing, that is not a super option. The other issue was that the resulting content was now forever Elementorized, or at least appeared so. I did almost bite and commit to Elementor. Almost…
Thanks to some of your videos, I dug into FSE and found that did most of what I wanted, and sometimes with just a bit of css or php, I was set.
Guess wanting to learn (thank you), and my software development roots paid off.
It’s been a bit of a learning curve, but I’m doing things now in Cwicly I could only dream about in Oxygen (like live time compiling of SCSS built right into their stylesheet code editor.)
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