You can set your clock by it – the recurring flare-ups of Gutenberg frustrations that turn into tweets that turn into videos that turn into livestreams that turn into… what exactly? I’m not entirely sure. What are we frustrated about? Leadership. Vision. Direction. Governance. Inflation. But above all: Gutenberg.

I won’t retread the arguments about Gutenberg. I’ve been putting out plenty of posts outlining all of the missing functionality I’ve been hoping for (components, version control, navigation/menus, developer experience) in the editor, along with my share of spicy tweets. I contribute. I file my GitHub issues like a good boy. I like to think I’m very honest with you about the pros and the cons. And I’ve long advocated for exactly what others are calling for: spend the next year or so on refining the interface, not on new features.

In page builder circles, it used to be that the block editor was “garbage.” Now the block editor is fine in small doses, but the site editor is “garbage”. This round of uproar was a bit different though, because for the first time, there was an open and honest reaction (this time from Paul at WPTuts) to the idea that you can’t just complain online and be mad that no one is listening to you. You have to- as Matt Medieros said– meet them halfway. So kudos to Paul for being the change he wants to see in the software and commenting on an issue. And I fully understand that this issue could sit ignored for five years or told that it will never happen due to some arcane use case or a real accessibility conflict. It happens to me, too. Like everything else in life, “it’s often who you know, not what you know.” “The squeaky wheel gets the oil.” “To everything there is a season, a time to laugh and a time to mourn.”

And the frustrations rage on.

Here’s my take.

More than any other part in WordPress history, Gutenberg is first and foremost a user experience (lowercase letters). In the past, it was OK that WordPress was kinda clunky and technical, because so was the rest of the internet. At least it was extensible.

Developers showed up and created things like ACF or Elementor or Admin Columns Pro or whatever to smooth over all those gaps. Third-party extenders provided much of the great “user experience” that core was lacking. The fact that all of those plugins still exist and still make money is a testament to the fact the WordPress has legs. People say core should “merge” these popular plugins in, but I say “why?” We pay for them -> they continually get better. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.

With Gutenberg, the entire block editor is built to control the user experience. It’s not a blank slate for developers, it’s very opinionated. It says what kind of HTML you can use, CSS you can load, where you can edit the UI, where you can’t, and so on.

Want a custom component? Cool, go write a bunch of React and also PHP and also make sure it doesn’t break with each update. Want to learn how? Cool, you’re going to have to read through hundreds of pages of technical manuals that weren’t written for you or else dig through random blog posts from the last seven years to fully understand it. Good luck.

To be clear, this high level of “control” being exerted over the software is also a symptom of the WordPress project in general.

It’s always going to be hard to compare WordPress to other open-source developer frameworks and languages, because Ruby on Rails doesn’t care about your drag-and-drop editor. Next.js isn’t trying to “democratize publishing”. PHP isn’t interested in hosting it’s own Creative Commons media library, micromanaging all local and global meetups/events, owning a supposedly “external” media outlet, or really interfere into any of the other layers of bureaucracy that WordPress core has decided to absorb into it’s central mass. It really is a unique proposition.

Back to Gutenberg. The refrain you hear pretty often is that Gutenberg is trying to appeal to both ‘simple’ and ‘advanced’ users, and thus is doing neither one of them fairly well. I pretty much agree with this take. I’m a big fan of “less is more”, pick one thing and do it right.

But here’s the caveat: Gutenberg’s weakness is also its strength. With a heavily curated editor experience, you can actually give a site built in Gutenberg to a non-technical user and they can happily edit their content. I see it all the time. The advanced developers are using Gutenberg to create better editorial experiences for their clients, who are non-technical users. This is what differentiates Gutenberg from most page builders that are built specifically to appeal to technical users.

But that differentiating feature sort of stops at the block editor and doesn’t need to be a focus of the site editor, because the site editor does not feel like a place for non-technical users.

So I think most people who are reading this would agree with me here as well: It’s time for Gutenberg to pause focus on building an interface for basic users, and put all focus (in the immediate future) on advanced users / power users. Give as much power as possible to the advanced developers, because just like before, they’ll use that power to create the “simplified” user experiences that grow the ecosystem from a product-first perspective.

Now I know that this would have it’s tradeoffs. One goal of Gutenberg is a unified experience of WordPress – a shared visual language for the dashboard and a shared data structure for our content. Unification is still a valuable and achievable goal, but right now it’s simply not happening, even for those of us who don’t use any heavy plugins or page builders. We’re all stuck in limbo right now.

Plus, the new crop of builders running on top of Gutenberg (Kadence, Greyd, Generate, Cwicly) are amazing but are still very much their own unique data and user experience. Yes, you can sort turn one off and turn the other on, but that’s really not going to be very smooth when all their custom blocks and controls break down. There’s still going to be major content/data issues regardless.

I know it’s why they’re being very careful before opening up any extensibility APIs in Gutenberg. I heard Apple’s Craig Federighi say recently that offering public APIs are a lot of responsibility because an API is a promise to developers that you have to keep.

On the flip side, the fact that Gutenberg has a strong modern UI and a suite of components and dataviews means that we’re getting close to a cohesive vision of an admin redesign.

What’s happening in Gutenberg?

My armchair theory: Gutenberg is being led by it’s engineers. What I mean is: feature requests are chosen primarily by developers, who have very little central prioritization or shared incentives. Then at the end of the release cycle, a few user experience people test it out, pick what’s “good enough” to include in core, and spin it into a cohesive narrative for the broader community. And I think that’s backwards.

I’d love to see more power given to product managers, like user experience experts, to isolate key areas of improvement, define a short-term roadmap and then enlist developer support. To be empowered to set the clear expectation that only bug fixes and priorities from the roadmap are being merged into Gutenberg right now.

I know WordPress releases aren’t typically driven this way. Developers want to work on shiny, new, weird. They don’t want to do maintenance or pick up old, half-finished features. I can say this from experience. I’m a developer. New projects are much more fun. But someone needs to go back and finish the damn navigation menu experience in FSE! Or at least make it extensible enough so that we see someone build a true “Mega Menu” plugin inside of Gutenberg.

If you watch Paul’s very well made critique from last week or watch the one Jamie Marsland and I did a few months back, the cleanup of the user experience- specifically the “power user” experience- is sorely needed. And you’ll also see that every one has their own opinions on what the priorities should be. I know that none of this is easy.

So where does that leave us? My vote is that we focus on the power users who use WordPress every day and I promise you’ll see more block themes and more adoption of the block editor from the people with the loudest microphones who are making the most popular content. Do you agree?

Postscript: And for all of the armchair critics of Gutenberg/Full Site Editing who don’t use it anyway, I would love to know what your biggest “existential” concerns are at the moment? If WordPress takes another seven years to get full site editing to a great place, and you’ve spent all that time using Bricks and Elementor and building WordPress sites exactly the way you want, what is the big worry?