After two years of miscommunication the Gutenberg Drama has finally reached a tipping point. WordPress has been forked. Welcome to ClassicPress.
The thing is, when your an Open Source platform like WordPress and you find yourself in a position where leadership from the top-down ignores their users concerns, then has a habitual pattern of blatantly deleting any dissenting comments from their user and developer forums about their direction and decisions, THEN have the nerve to turn around blame those same users for not commenting on the direction sooner… well, it comes as no surprise that platform would eventually forked by more reasonable minded people.
WordPress has become CMS a platform that is depended on by not only by businesses and eCommerce solutions, but by developers around the world who rely on it as a source of income.
The cornerstone features of reliability and productive stability that propelled the WordPress platform to success, have been completely eroded by the misguided direction of trying to compete with Wix and SquareSpace while ignoring enduser developer concerns.
I do understand the reasoning for Gutenberg to some extent for the WordPress.com platform. Wix and SquareSpace tout their easy editor and how easy it makes designing a website. So it’s only logical that WordPress.com would have one eventually too so they could market the same feature. The problem with this argument is, anyone who’s ever actually used Wix or SquareSpace will tell you how horrible and limiting the experience using those editors are. Making all of this worse was the decision to bake this in to the WordPress.org version that developers use too.
So in yet another #metoo movement, Automatic created their own version of a horrible online editor, when in-fact what they had was actually, in my opinion, one of it’s biggest draws to the platform. All while there where obvious, proven, and better visual editing solutions already available to the general public that they could have incorporated.
Developers and web historians will probably look back at this for years about the bad decisions Automatic made while trying to create a solution to a problem that didn’t exist. More, the forked user base that’s been created will be thrown to the winds of uncertainty now that this door has been opened. I’m sure everyone will be wondering about the future of theme and plug-in compatibility going forward.
My final thoughts are that there is a massive online push by the community to keep the editor as a plugin and not bake it in to the core. A petition is to ask the WordPress team to keep Gutenberg out of the core of WordPress has been gaining massive support by top developers and community leaders. (But it’s been made clear that will never happen.) Maybe this will be the wake up call that brings the entire WordPress leadership team back to it’s senses and listening to it’s users again. Maybe they’ll get the project back upright again, but I doubt it.
I’m getting behind ClassicPress and will support it as much as possible. We’ll have to see what happens this year and how many plugin developers support it going forward.
Discover ClassicPress Here