Gutenberg: How is this better?

Every time I run into another weird, seemingly illogical quirk of the process of building a WordPress theme with Block Editor (a.k.a. “Gutenberg”) support, I ask myself the same question: How is this better?

As time goes by, the answer is starting to come into focus. Unfortunately, it’s not entirely satisfying.

Here’s what I’ve learned so far.

How is this better than what came before?

Well… what came before? You can’t ask the former without first answering the latter.

Over the years, WordPress has become many, many different things to different people. So you can’t expect the Block Editor/Gutenberg to be universally better (or worse) than what it’s replacing, because it’s replacing so many different things.

Is it better than the various “page builder” plugins out there? I’m looking at you, Elementor, Divi, Beaver Builder, and WPBakery, among others.

Honestly, I loathe every last one of these page builder plugins. Partly that’s because before I worked primarily with WordPress, I rolled my own CMSes for years, dating back to the pre-.NET Microsoft era of ASP talking to a SQL Server 7.0 database. Then I moved to MySQL and PHP, first building a completely custom system before any MVC frameworks existed, followed by several years of development on a fairly robust custom CMS based on the CakePHP framework. I was very proud of that work, but by 2014 it was clear WordPress (which I had used for my own blog and occasional client projects since 2006) was picking up enough steam as a general-purpose CMS that my own couldn’t keep up, and I took the WP plunge.

Almost immediately, I wholeheartedly embraced Advanced Custom Fields as my solution to extend WordPress. And, in particular, I used its Flexible Content fields to create my own Block Editor-style interface, years before Gutenberg existed.

It’s way better than page builders.

But it’s also not entirely “the WordPress way.” It’s way more “the way” than Elementor and its ilk, but still… it led to a situation where all page content on my sites is stored in the wp_postmeta table, which is not ideal, for many reasons.

What’s good about the Block Editor?

I absolutely, 100% prefer the Block Editor/Gutenberg over the popular page builder plugins. It’s a much cleaner, faster, more intuitive user experience, and it renders front-end pages quickly. It’s built in which is a benefit in and of itself. But honestly, it only feels built in because WordPress is changing itself to be more like Gutenberg, rather than Gutenberg being built to feel like the WordPress we know and love.

Aesthetically, I like the Block Editor. For usability… well, where do I begin? I’m an old fart who still expects all of the available options to be visible on-screen, not just “discoverable” if I happen to hover my mouse in the right spot. And I’m a lot more savvy to this new type of interface than most of my clients, so I struggle to understand how the WordPress core team thinks this is an optimal approach. (OK, so maybe this paragraph belongs in the “bad” section below.)

But that leads me to the best thing about the Block Editor, which is not inherently great. It is what it is. I don’t mean that as the empty cliché we hear a thousand times in every business meeting or reality show interview. I mean it literally: The Block Editor is WordPress now. There’s no going back. So while that may mean some growing pains and struggles, it also does mean that it will (probably) continue to get better over time, and unless it is an absolute failure, WordPress will continue to grow, which means it will always continue to receive support.

What’s bad about the Block Editor?

This is another one that really depends on your perspective: where you’re coming from, what you’re used to, what role you play in the creation of a website.

If you’re a content editor who is a capable system user but not a developer/UI designer, and you’re used to the “vanilla,” TinyMCE-based WordPress classic editor, there’s a very high probability that you will be confused, overwhelmed, and/or frustrated by the Block Editor, because the concept of “blocks” does not reveal itself in the most optimal way as you are discovering it. (I’m not sure what the most optimal way is, but I’m confident this isn’t it.) I will say, however, that the glitchy, wonky, invasive behavior of earlier iterations of Gutenberg has almost entirely been smoothed out.

On the other hand, if you’re that same content editor, but you’ve been forced in the past to work with Elementor, Divi, Beaver Builder, WPBakery, or something similar (and, if you have, I’m almost certain you hate it, based on anecdotal observations), then I think there’s a good chance you will love the Block Editor, at least if you’re given the opportunity to experience it in its pure form, not something that’s been bastardized the way those aforementioned plugins destroyed the classic editor.

But me? I’m a developer. Although I obviously spend a fair bit of time using the editor to test my work and also to assist in initial content loading on new sites, I mainly work behind the scenes, in code. And this is where I struggle mightily to understand just what the hell were they thinking??? with some of the decisions that went into how the Block Editor functions at a code level.

What’s it like to code for the Block Editor?

There are two main ways in which building Block Themes and/or coding for the Block Editor differ greatly from the “classic” way WordPress has functioned up to this point.

First, at a more surface level — in fact, it’s a level you can even stumble upon in the Block Editor itself if you click the right (wrong?) button — there’s the block markup, and how it gets stored in the database.

There is something that is absolute genius about this. In fact, conceptually it’s probably the biggest Eureka! moment of the entire Gutenberg project. All of the meta data about each block is just HTML comments. That means that all of the actual content of a page/post built with the Block Editor is stored where it should be in the database: in the post_content field of the wp_posts table.

This is much better than the way Advanced Custom Fields works. It’s fewer database queries, so it’s faster, and it’s where the content “belongs” so it’s automatically handled correctly by plugins — anything from Relevanssi for custom site search tools, to Yoast SEO for search engine optimization. (OK, those are both search-related, but in very different ways.) And the use of HTML comments for the meta data means it’s even backwards compatible: if the content gets loaded in a theme that doesn’t support the Block Editor, it may not look exactly right, but your content will at least still be on the page, in its entirety.

The problem is, the code itself is kind of a mess. I like the idea of using HTML comments to store the block meta data, and I like the use of JSON as the format for the properties.

But it often ends up being a lot of code, which is messy if you ever need to look “under the hood.”

And it’s fairly brittle, so if you edit any of it directly, you’re probably going to break it, and at this point the Block Editor only has middling success at recovering “broken” blocks.

And the documentation so far is woefully lacking. I know only too well how hard it is to make the time to write proper documentation, but when you’re forcing a change this radical on a user base this large, you need to prioritize it.

And worst of all, all of that JSON code is really only to get the editor to “remember” the settings for the block when you go to edit it. Most of the details also have to be repeated in the class attribute for the container HTML element in order to actually render anything stylistically in the page. (Once again, I don’t really know the optimal solution, but this isn’t it.)

And. And. And. And. And. (Sorry, wrong software, but since it’s timely I thought I’d throw it in there to amuse myself when I re-read this post in a few years.)

OK, all of that was only the first way the Block Editor differs greatly from the classic WordPress developer experience. The other way is the template structures that go into a theme.

I’m pretty flexible about how code files should be organized, as long as they are organized. Each project is unique, and as long as it has a consistent internal structure, it doesn’t have to be the same as every other one. I know this attitude is somewhat heretical in certain circles, and honestly the fact that WordPress has heretofore been just as flexible has created a lot of headaches for people trying to understand how themes, plugins and the WordPress core interact. It can also make it exceedingly difficult to jump into a custom theme someone else built and figure out where the hell everything is.

I get it. And I appreciate the core team’s efforts to impose a new, consistent structure that reinvents the way WordPress themes are built, and that aligns with how the Block Editor works.

I also get that it was not just an arbitrary decision to build the Block Editor on React. The Block Editor needs to be dynamic in a way the classic editor is not, so a purely PHP-based interface would not work. Not even something using the already-present jQuery would do the trick.

But building the Block Editor on React requires developers to know or learn React. I’m all for people learning new skills and adapting with the times (even though I haven’t bothered to learn React yet), but it’s a tall order to force an entire development ecosystem to radically shift gears.

That’s not even my biggest criticism though. What really bothers me about the new Block Theme template structure is the move away from PHP in areas where server-side scripting clearly offers some major benefits, with only the most nebulous justifications for the change. It usually comes down to “PHP is too intimidating to users,” but I find that really hard to accept, because PHP is much easier to learn, especially to a “dabbler” level, than React, and it’s way more forgiving than JSON.

So far my work on a new Block Theme hasn’t even touched React (partly thanks to my good old friend, Advanced Custom Fields). I’m coming around to the theme.json file, the more I work with it. I still want to be able to use PHP to dynamically set site properties, but I’m learning, little by little, how to accomplish my goals without it. (Or, perhaps, I’m changing those goals to suit the new platform.) I’m also slowly coming to understand that theme.json is mostly just for generating the inline CSS Gutenberg outputs in the <head> (and some ancillary functionality in the editor itself), and not a comprehensive spot for all manner of site parameters.

What I really do not understand, and may never accept, however, is the decision to make the files in the templates folder plain HTML files instead of PHP. In fact, my struggles with this very issue are what prompted this entire rant.

How do I use translation functions on hardcoded text in the templates, without PHP?

How do I selectively display post meta data — like author, publish date, and taxonomies — for posts in the search results template, but not for pages, without PHP?

I don’t have answers to these questions. Yet. But they beg the larger question of why the templates aren’t written in PHP in the first place. Is it a performance thing? That might be justifiable. But the whole “ease of use” argument makes no sense. A person isn’t going to be creating a theme in the first place if they don’t know some PHP.

No, I think it probably all comes down to being a decision that’s part of the development roadmap for Full Site Editing. So the decision is more about what the core team wants than what I want. Fair enough.

Who is this really for?

This is another grand question. Who is the Block Editor really for? Who is WordPress really for? I had never really asked that question, rhetorically or literally, until the Gutenberg project.

WordPress started out as blogging software. But it has since become much more than that. It famously powers somewhere around 40% of the web. Are 40% of websites blogs? In terms of sheer number of sites, maybe. In terms of amount of traffic, definitely not.

WordPress powers everything from the most obscure blog no one but its owner reads (don’t look at me) to massively popular sites that have thousands of simultaneous users. And it’s not just blogs. WordPress may not have been designed to be a general-purpose CMS, nor, in many ways, is it ideally suited to that purpose, but historically it has had the right mix of flexibility, extensibility, ease of use, and low barriers of entry, that it has come to be used for just about any purpose one might imagine a website serving.

But who is it really for?

I’m reminded of the story (recounted by John Gruber on a recent episode of The Talk Show) that Steve Jobs apparently pushed for the creation of the iPhone because he wanted a way to check his email on the toilet. The iPhone is, in the most generous sense, for everyone. But in a particular way that was critical to its actually coming into existence, it was for Steve Jobs and his bathroom correspondence habits.

So again, who is WordPress really for? Who’s making the decisions that ultimately determine what goes into it, that define what it is? That of course would be the core team, and probably more than anyone, the leader of the core team, Matt Mullenweg. I don’t know much about Matt, other than that he spearheaded the initial WordPress project (at least once it was forked from b2), that he now runs the semi-eponymous Automattic, and that we most likely have very different senses of humor. (Consider this: I’ve written a plugin that partly exists to remove humor/”folksiness” baked into WordPress that I am pretty sure is attributable to Matt.)

Matt still leads the core team, and has final say on certain decisions about its direction. Ultimately, if he thinks something matters for WordPress, it makes it in. And he clearly believes WordPress is still primarily, if not entirely, for blogging.

Again, maybe in terms of number of sites, “most” WordPress sites are straight-up personal blogs. But in terms of an active ecosystem, a development community of people who are able to make a living building WordPress sites, who comprise a thriving professional industry, in my experience, at least, blogging is peripheral or absent entirely from most professional applications of WordPress. It’s a general-purpose CMS, first and foremost, even if that’s not what it was originally intended to be. And, sadly, even if that’s still not what its core development team prioritizes.

I don’t know. I’m just me. A solo, somewhat iconoclastic developer who likes to do things their own way. I’ll probably never embrace putting spaces inside the parentheses in my PHP code, and I definitely won’t use if: endif; constructs.

I have strong opinions, but I’m not an idealist.

I just want PHP in my damn templates. Is that too much to ask?


Ironic side note: This site is one of the few cases where I have built a WordPress site that absolutely is a blog, full stop. And it’s not using Gutenberg, because I set up the Classic Editor plugin on it ages ago. But as I write and edit this post, I’m actually finding myself wishing I had the site running Gutenberg instead of switching between the back end and the front end. Of course, that’s because I always write my posts in plain HTML rather than the visual editor. I said I’m an old fart.

Please think twice before leaving a flippant negative review

Last week I launched a new WordPress plugin, No Nonsense, and much to my surprise, it started to pick up steam after just a couple of days. It turns out, it got featured with a nice review on WP Tavern, and people took notice.

Unfortunately, almost immediately, it got a couple of really negative reviews, both of which were clearly dashed off with very little thought, or apparently even the slightest bit of effort on the part of the reviewers to try to determine the cause of their issues before leaving a negative review — rather than submitting a support ticket, which would be the correct channel for addressing a problem… if they actually wanted to solve it.

I take pride in the quality of my work, and I try hard to make sure it performs flawlessly. I respond quickly to any issues — even for a free plugin like this — because I want to make things right. So it is really painful to have the product of my efforts permanently stained with a negative review by someone who can’t be bothered to take the time to write a single cohesive sentence detailing the issues they had with it.

I understand the temptation to rip on something you think is garbage, and I’ve left a few one-star plugin reviews myself. But I feel it’s important to at least explain in detailed and objective terms why I think something is bad. And maybe if it’s clearly something brand new, I’d wait a while to see if the creators take the time to work out the kinks first.

So, no matter what you do, no matter where you are, if you are in a position to criticize someone else’s work, I implore you to take a second and think about the impact you might be having on that person and on what they’re trying to accomplish, and whether or not your criticism is truly valid and warranted. Perhaps it is not, in which case, I would respectfully suggest you stay quiet. But maybe it is. In that case, think about whether a terse and flippant negative review is really the best way you can contribute to improving the situation, or if there’s a more effective, more constructive way to share your input.

How are open source CMSes like Microsoft enterprise software?

Aside from the fact that both topics would put the average blog reader to sleep before the end of the first…

OK, now that they’re asleep, let’s talk. Throughout most of my career, open source software and Microsoft’s (or, really, any software behemoth’s) enterprise “solutions” have seemed diametrically opposed. But the more I think about the situation, I begin to find some startling similarities, at least in their implementation (and reasons for said implementation), if not in their actual structure and licensing.

If you’re the one person (besides me) who’s spent any significant amount of time reading this blog, you probably know two things: 1) I don’t like Microsoft, and 2) I don’t like Drupal. So these are the objects of my scorn in today’s post as well, although the problems I’m describing can be generalized, I think, to the broader sectors of the software industry that they represent.

When I worked in the corporate world, I resented Microsoft’s dominance across the board from operating systems to desktop software to enterprise systems. It just seemed that most of their tools weren’t really that good, and eventually I began to realize that the reason they were successful was that Microsoft’s customers were not the end users, but rather the IT managers who made purchasing decisions. These decisions were largely based on their own knowledge and experience with Microsoft’s software (to the detriment of other, possibly superior options), but also (I believe cynically) to preserve their own jobs and those of their staffs. Microsoft’s systems require(d?) constant maintenance and support. Not only did this mean bigger IT staffs on the corporate payroll, but it meant lots of highly paid “consulting” firms whose sole job was to promote and then support the sales and implementation of Microsoft products.

In the indie developer world, where I now reside, the culture and software platforms are different, but perhaps not as different as they seem. Apple’s computers dominate the desktops in small studios, and the tabletops in coffeehouses where freelancers can frequently be spotted hunched over their MacBooks hard at work while sipping lattes and meeting (usually a little too loudly) with clients. And open source software dominates at the server level.

But just like Microsoft’s platforms, I think most open source software just isn’t really very good. And the problem, once again, is the customer (or… well… whatever you call the person who makes the decisions when selecting a free product). It seems that the end user experience is rarely given much priority when most open source software is being designed and developed. Part of the problem is a lack of direct contact between the development teams and those end users (or, to be honest, even between the geographically scattered members of the development teams themselves). Devs don’t really know what end users want or need. They only know what they want or need, along with what’s been submitted to their bug trackers.

It’s not that these devs are bad people, or bad at what they do. There’s just a disconnect between coder and user, and as a result the goal of building good software isn’t met.

So, why do independent developers still use tools that are not really the best for their clients? Again, cynically, I wonder sometimes if job security isn’t a factor. It’s a lot easier to build something that works, but that requires indefinite, ongoing attention and support, than to build something that is flawless, that you can hand off to your client and never touch again. It’s easier… and it provides built-in job security.

Now, I’m not perfect, and I’m not above all of this. There is no such thing as flawless software, and I have ongoing support contracts with some of my bigger clients. But I’m proud to say that’s mostly because I’m constantly building new sites for them, or building functional enhancements onto the sites they already have, rather than doing endless bug fixes and technical support because the tools I’ve sold them are too confusing or simply don’t work right. Sure, the bug fixes and tech support do happen. But the tools — primarily WordPress and cms34, my own CMS — are built much more with the end user in mind, and have managed to avoid the pitfalls that mean a guaranteed job for me at the expense of a mediocre user experience for my clients.

That’s harder, and riskier. But it’s better. I’m delivering a higher quality product to the clients, and I’m keeping my own work interesting and moving forward.

Barack Obama: the open-source candidate?

Now we’re speaking close to my heart. Granted, I’m a freeloader in the open source world. I have yet to contribute a single line of code to an open source project. (OK, I guess that’s not entirely true: I did write a WordPress plugin. Sweet. I’m in the club! Sort of.) But I have wholly embraced open source software in my work. PHP FTW, baby! (Uh yeah… whatever.)

These days the only thing I’m a more enthusiastic and outspoken proponent of than open source software is Barack Obama. So I’m surprised it took me so long to research what he’s running his website on.

Linux PWS/1.3.28

*Whew* Glad to see it’s Linux. But what the heck is PWS? I was at a loss. Then I found this blog talking about the very same issue. And suddenly it made sense why I didn’t recognize the acronym. I never would have considered Microsoft’s Personal Web Server to be the web server of choice running on a Linux server. I am still scratching my head at it. The whole VM thing seems the only logical explanation, except that there’s no logic to explain it. At least it’s not so transparently ass-backwards as John McCain’s configuration:

Linux Microsoft-IIS/6.0

And the inexplicable:

Linux ECAcc (lhr)

Interestingly, though, a Google search for “ECAcc (lhr)” reveals a link to a Digg post entitled John McCain Owns VoteForTheMILF.com. Stay classy, San Diego.

Let’s be clear: I think the idea of running a web site under Windows in a virtual machine on a Linux box is the most incomprehensible, mind-bogglingly stupid arrangement you’d ever bother with. I’d have to guess that the sites were developed to run in a Windows environment, but when it came time to deal with practical server and network capacity issues, load balancing and whatnot, some sysadmin made the (probably prudent) decision to load balance on Linux boxes instead of Windows, but since the site was tied to some feeble Windows technology, they couldn’t just move it over to Linux wholesale.

But let’s take this a step further. Back in late spring I received an email from Barack Obama’s IT director soliciting applicants for web developer positions with the campaign. Even though the job was in Boston, I figured it would be insane not to apply, so I submitted my resume. (I never heard back, for what it’s worth.) And it’s from this that I happen to know that the campaign was specifically seeking PHP developers. Rock on.

With that in mind, the whole Windows-on-Linux-through-VM arrangement made even less sense. Why would they develop the site in PHP, run it on a Windows server (definitely not the optimal arrangement for a PHP-based app, though it certainly will work), and then VM that Windows environment on a Linux box, instead of just gearing the PHP app for a Linux server in the first place? And that’s when I remembered that just earlier in the day I had been looking at taxcut.barackobama.com. Of course! Separate third-level domains are all over Obama’s site. Let’s check the configuration on that domain. Now that’s much better:

Linux Apache/1.3.34 (Debian) mod_gzip/1.3.26.1a AuthMySQL/4.3.9-2 PHP/5.2.0-8+etch10

And I think it explains a lot. Campaigns start off small. Obama had to register barackobama.com and put something up there ages ago, long before he was the Democratic nominee and the hugely successful fundraiser he became along the way. So that original site, www.barackobama.com, was probably developed on a Windows box in someone’s proverbial basement, probably when was running for the U.S. Senate or maybe even the Illinois Senate. But as the campaign has grown, its websites (plural) have grown as well, and in a decidedly open-source direction. There’s some good stuff in there. Debian (which could mean Ubuntu, too… I haven’t checked the signature on Ubuntu’s Apache package to see if it’s split from its Debian roots), PHP (and a reasonably up-to-date version at that), MySQL, etc.

It’s kind of fun to do this kind of research, as long as you don’t mind being distracted along the way, because there are plenty of weird sources of distraction.

Aside from the aforementioned MILF site (classy), and the somewhat interesting fact that searching on “PWS/1.3.28” brings back as its first result a reference to Obama’s hosting, I discovered that for some reason the page title on John McCain’s official store is “Independent Online Stores.” OK. No one looks at title bars. And even fewer web developers look at <title> tags. I know that from experience. But of course that’s just a transitional landing page, announcing that McCain wares are not actually sold by the campaign, but by independent, for-profit companies, and buying these items doesn’t translate into money going back into the campaign. Huh. I can’t quite wrap my brain around that, but I’m a lifelong, union-loving Democrat, so I guess I wasn’t meant to. The only thing that comes to mind is that maybe it has to be that way, legally, now that he’s accepted public campaign financing. Anyway, the first McCain store link I found, which as they state is apparently an independent operation not affiliated with the campaign, is, not surprisingly, running:

Windows Server 2008 Microsoft-IIS/7.0

I also found that the company that hosts some of Obama’s pages also hosts a site for the American Model Yachting Association. Really? Model yachting? That exists?