In reply to Matt.

Matt,

All of that is great but none of is is a reason to make Gutenberg part of core, and it doesn't address the very real concern that tens of thousands of perfectly good sites are going to need to be rebuilt unless Gutenberg is optional rather than mandatory. How am I supposed to explain to my clients that the site which was working perfectly has to be rebuilt? At what point do I start building new sites using Gutenberg rather than metaboxes ready for the transition? Should I be doing that now? I mean, I build sites which I hope are going to have a 3-5 year lifespan before a client needs a total rebuild (because they're investing a not insignificant amount of money in to their site builds) so some sort of very clear long term roadmap or reassurance we can use legacy systems for a considerable time is going to be really handy.

But one of the biggest issues I have with your reply here is this section:

Developers and agencies will be able to create interactive templates that clients can easily add to and update without breaking things or having to figure out custom post types, for example imagine an “employee” custom block that you can put on the about page that includes a picture, name, and bio. They’ll be able to replace most meta boxes. They’ll probably also get a chance to update old code or clients to work in this new paradigm.

Imagine a client paying £5000 for a custom site design and the staff who edit the site getting carried away with blocks and going off-brand on page after page. It's hard enough stopping some editors using font colours and sizes no matter how many times style guides are waved under their noses, so what on earth is this going to do to sites?

They’ll be able to replace most meta boxes.

Meta boxes are good in a lot of cases. Really good. They're not just about layout and design, they're about adding data in one place which can be used in multiple places around a site... a user can add a start and end date to an event in one meta box and that can be used to display, to order events, to change things elsewhere on the site to reflect a current event, any number of different things. Meta boxes mean my clients know that they need to prepare their content with an intro, some body copy, x number of bits of other data, and they can pop that in to the relevant boxes in the back end and they'll get a consistent, on-brand, well set out set of pages. They also mean we can re-skin sites in ways which re-use custom post types and meta without needing to touch a single bit of content in the database. Imagine an employee custom post type which you can drop in to a page with a shortcode but which can also power a staff directory orderable, searchable and filterable by job title, department, location, you name it. Now imagine every staff member needs a profile page with consistent layout which only requires editors to select departments from a drop-down or to type a job title in a box marked "job title" knowing that every single one of their 200 staff will have a consistent profile page. Because I have to imagine that right now, because I'm building it, and Gutenberg would not make this possible. It certainly wouldn't make it possible to import those 200 staff members seamlessly from a CSV with all the right data in all the right places.

And how does eCommerce work with Gutenberg? How does WooCommerce fit in with this?

The point of a content management system should be a separation of layout from content: it should be that we can create a granularity of data which means that the front-end can be changed without needing to re-key all of that data and for a long time that's been the beauty of WordPress. I've loved WP for so long as a developer because it's given me and my clients the flexibility to do anything, and if Gutenberg is core and in no way optional it takes that away from us.

WordPress - the web, indeed - has moved on from blogging a lot. WordPress is not a blogging platform any more. It's a CMS. It's a great, affordable, flexible CMS which allows my clients - who wouldn't otherwise be able to afford full content management - to have sites built on an open platform supported by thousands of developers. This feels like such a huge step backwards. Gutenberg is great for blog posts. Gutenberg is a great replacement for the Visual Composer plugin. The thing is, I've never built a site using the Visual Composer plugin, and the ones I've supported which use it are hated by their editors for their complexity and the option paralysis page builders bring.

I know, of course, that there's going to be some way of making Gutenberg work with this data and to work around all of this, but to answer this point:

They’ll probably also get a chance to update old code or clients to work in this new paradigm

Who pays for this? How long will this take? How do I sell this to my clients? "You have to pay me to rebuild your site because the software has fundamentally changed in order to compete with those services I convinced you not to use because WP is so flexible" is not a sales tactic I want to use. For many of us, we don't rely on other people's themes at all: many of us develop from scratch, making a change this fundamental a shift which will impact tens of our clients at a time. The transition period for me to update all my clients to use such a fundamentally different version of WP would be a couple of years: the last to be transitioned would be sitting on out of date versions for a long time (although thank you for the move over the last few years to support old versions with security updates!)

Competing with Wix and Squarespace is all very well for .com, and for one-man-band companies who've built their own small .org-based site themselves alongside their day to day business. Don't get me wrong, Gutenberg is brilliant for a lot of people. Page builder based themes are generally terrible and Gutenberg can address these issues in a wonderful way. But this is not a reason to make it core. Making it core alienates a huge number of people: those individuals and agencies who build custom sites in WordPress, using it as a framework, doing really interesting stuff where WP becomes the perfect client-facing content management system in the truest sense: a way to get content in to and out of a database. The REST API has the potential to be a game changer for us: I've been banging on about WP as a headless CMS for some time now. The REST API is something which made me feel optimistic about WP, and moving things forward, and learning new techniques.

Please, please reassure us that you'll take on board the needs of the developer community. Lots of people have suggested that Gutenberg becomes optional. It surely can't take much to have a wp-config setting to pick "new" or "classic" WP on setup; or to consider the Gutenberg experiment as a door to something bigger, an "editor agnostic" WordPress with much more easily swapable editors (much like Drupal, I'm sorry to say).

I'm struggling to see the need for Gutenberg beyond what feels like a cynical attempt to grab market share from Wix and the like, and if this is the case, then surely it only needs to be made mandatory on .com? There's a lot else to address on WP first: media management, sorting and filtering, and menu management, for example. Certainly not the editor. I've never once had a client ask for that to be changed, but I do get a lot of comments about finding uploaded images or how difficult it is to build big menus.

I have to say, I'm pretty sad about the direction WP is taking with Gutenberg. I've been developing with WordPress for 10 years now and I've built a business around it. It's a pretty huge part of my life. But it feels like a schism is coming. It feels like we're going to see the last non-Gutenberg version of WordPress branched off into something new, like you did with b2 all those years ago, taking much of the existing ecosystem with it. I feel, right now, as if I need to decide whether to abandon the WordPress project and find a new framework, and if I do, I feel like I need to do it soon.

Edited to add: I want to be open minded about this. I am curious to see how it develops, and - if it's done right - I see that it could be great. It looks wonderful. But I'm concerned.