Tag Archives: Site Editor

The final (?) verdict: Gutenberg (a.k.a. the WordPress “Block Editor”) is fundamentally flawed and unsustainable

I’ve been trying. Really I have.

From its initial release as part of the WordPress core in version 5.0 in late 2018, up until early 2022, I adamantly refused to use Gutenberg. I felt its conceptual flaws and practical limitations were so profound and so obvious that I really could not believe this was going to be “the future of WordPress.” And now here we are.

In the spring of 2022 I finally relented, as at least the initial impression of the user interface had improved to a point where I felt I just needed to embrace it or move on. And so I created a new base “Block Theme” for future WordPress projects, and began building new client sites with it.

The past year and a half of dealing with Gutenberg more directly has been a painful rollercoaster of emotions, as I’ve tried repeated to convince myself it’s good, only to have it, once again, prove itself a hot mess of ill-conceived and barely-documented hacks.

Many times in the past 18 or so months I have contemplated abandoning WordPress for good, checking out ClassicPress and some other CMS options before falling back on giving Gutenberg another chance.

I’ve even considered writing my own Content Management System (CMS) [again; it’s something I specialized in before 2014]; switching to Drupal, for God’s sake (until I read that they’re porting Gutenberg for Drupal too… why why why?!); scrapping CMSes altogether in favor of just building sites with Bootstrap (and giving clients some rudimentary editing tools for the very few elements of their sites most of them actually modify post-launch); and even quitting the field entirely.

Frankly I don’t have the time or energy to make an extensive, coherent case for why Gutenberg is so fundamentally flawed; suffice to say it’s a combination of four main issues:

  1. frustrations over its excessive reliance on React (the Flash of the 2020s) for so much of its functionality,
  2. irritation at its embrace of the “make the interface seem simple by just hiding everything until the user hovers over the right magic spot” approach to UI/UX design,
  3. trying to get a handle on how the damn thing works, due to its combination of woefully inadequate and outdated documentation, and the fact that it is constantly changing, in ways that break my code (which was written based on earlier assumptions about how things worked, because that was all I had to go on), and
  4. its absolute, unforgivable abandonment of the core web design principle of separation of content and presentation.

The last one is really the killer, and it is only getting worse, because not only does the code — that fragile, convoluted, redundant code, stored in the database — become increasingly unmanageable the more you build your site, but WordPress is constantly pushing more of its structure into this disastrous framework (if you can call it a framework). The Site Editor is a true abomination that can’t possibly be useful to anyone… except possibly “no code” website builders. But honestly, if you can’t write code, you should just be using Squarespace instead of WordPress. You’ll be much happier, and so will your clients.

All of these issues probably stem from one even more basic to the whole discussion though: the creators of WordPress (especially imperious leader Matt Mullenweg) do not consider WordPress to be for what most of us “WordPress professionals” actually use it for. To them, it is blogging software. Period. But very few people who make a living in the WordPress ecosystem are using it to build blogs. Instead we are using it as a general-purpose CMS.

Gutenberg is adequate for a basic blog — in fact, I’m using it for this one, and I do prefer editing my posts in Gutenberg vs. Classic Editor. Its severe flaws and limitations don’t become readily apparent in the “basic blog” context.

There’s an argument to be made that Gutenberg really exists for WordPress.com to compete with the likes of Medium and Substack, and the industry of us web professionals who use the open source version are of no consequence to Matt’s vision for the platform.

Anyway, I have managed to launch about ten new client sites in the past year-plus using WordPress with Gutenberg, and every time I have had to face frustration and embarrassment as I acknowledge with clients the limitations of the tool, or sympathize with their frustrations in dealing with it as users.

My current project may be the last straw though. I’m two days away from launching the biggest site, by far, that I’ve built with Gutenberg. It’s over a year in the making, and now at the eleventh hour I am confronting the possibility of having to manually edit a huge number of posts in a CPT I created — and naively used the Block Editor to manage instead of just some ACF fields — because the client wants to change the default text sizes.

It’s possible this situation could be remedied by the merger of Block Patterns and Reusable Blocks that happened in WordPress 6.3, but guess what… we had already created all of this before that functionality was an option. I still haven’t had time to even figure out exactly what the implications of these 6.3 changes are, because I’ve been too busy just trying to build the site.

That’s where WordPress is really dying for me as a viable platform to work on. It’s supposed to be the foundation for what I do, but now the ground is constantly shifting beneath my feet. Gutenberg is making web development much harder and more frustrating, projects are taking longer, and it’s making me look incompetent and unprofessional to my clients. I’ve been a professional web developer since 1996; I’ve been using WordPress for projects since 2008, and almost exclusively since 2014. But now I don’t trust it anymore.

I’m in a position where I may (fingers crossed) be able to back off taking on any new freelance projects for the remainder of the year, once this site has launched. I am really hoping that’s the case, because it’s time for me to make a serious re-evaluation of whether or not I want to build any more WordPress sites in the future, and if not, I need to take that time to learn — or build — a new platform.

The great irony, of course, is that my business has increasingly been made up of selling and supporting my commercial WordPress plugin, ICS Calendar Pro. Fortunately, my work on that plugin has very little to do with, nor is significantly impacted by, the Gutenberg/Block Editor project, although that may change as WordPress continues to (d)evolve.

(Don’t even get me started on how bad Gutenberg is for responsive design.)

Surely you can’t be serious: Does Gutenberg REALLY do this???

I’m building a pair of new WordPress sites for a client, using a base block theme I created. My plan going in was to create two child themes, one for each site. But after I finished the first site, I realized that the differences between the two were entirely cosmetic, so I thought I would use the new global style variations feature to just create one child theme for both sites to use, letting the sites have their own separate theme.json files via the styles folder in the child theme. (Let’s call them site1.json and site2.json.)

The problem is, I have a few site-specific code customizations beyond what can be handled in the theme.json file. And, more importantly, I want to hardcode which style variation each site uses. No need to muck around with the Site Editor (a.k.a. “Full Site Editing”). I do not want the client to have any access to that feature whatsoever.

So, I figured… OK, I’ll create a constant based on the domain, to tell me which site we’re on. I can use that for all of my “old school” PHP-based site-specific stuff. Now I just need to find the function WordPress uses to tell which style variation the site is configured to use.

Except… uh… I really can’t seem to do that. I googled it. I used the dreadful search tool in the WordPress Developer Reference. I checked a few of the tutorial sites. Nothing.

I even poked around the WordPress source code. Still nothing.

Finally, I rationalized… well, it has to be storing that setting in the database, so I’ll just temporarily turn on the Site Editor, set my style variation, and then search the wp_options table of the database to see where it turned up, and then maybe I can reverse engineer from that.

Nope.

There’s nothing in the wp_options table.

Oh no, I thought. They aren’t putting this into the wp_posts table, are they?

Yes, and no.

Yes they are, but no, it’s not what I thought. It’s much, much worse. They’re copying the entire contents of the style variation’s JSON file into the table.

Ugh. I mean, I kind of get why they’re doing that… because you can make additional customizations directly in the Site Editor, and that “post” (eye roll emoji — yes I have the stupid built-in WordPress emoji functionality disabled via my No Nonsense plugin) is where those changes get stored. But, uh, wouldn’t it also make sense to store the name of the base style variation itself, in case the user wants to reset it? Maybe they do — somewhere — but I’m once again too demoralized by the seeming absurdity of this whole enterprise to try to track it down.

The big problem is, this means I can’t just hardcode a way for the two sites to load a style variation’s JSON instead of the base theme.json file. And since that file is &#%^!#ing JSON instead of PHP, I can’t put conditional logic directly in it.

I’m leaving this post here, with the situation unresolved at the moment, but my next avenue will be to see if I can find a place where I can shunt WordPress over to using my variation JSON files.

Yes, I am Doing It Wrong™. But if you ask me, the entire thing is doing it wrong.

And don’t call me Shirley.

Update: OK, like, ten seconds after I published this, I decided that the correct course of action is simply to, alas, scrap my idea of using global style variations, and go back to building two separate child themes, even though it will mean a lot of redundancy. Global style variations are a good idea, but they’re just not implemented in a way that is practical for me to use. (Which makes me wonder if the way they’re implemented is really practical for anyone to use, but once again I am clearly not the core team’s target audience.) Thank goodness I hadn’t yet emptied the trash on my Mac.