{"id":47503,"date":"2017-08-27T19:23:40","date_gmt":"2017-08-28T02:23:40","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/ma.tt\/?p=47503"},"modified":"2025-11-01T13:06:45","modified_gmt":"2025-11-01T20:06:45","slug":"we-called-it-gutenberg-for-a-reason","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ma.tt\/2017\/08\/we-called-it-gutenberg-for-a-reason\/","title":{"rendered":"We Called it Gutenberg for a Reason"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Movable type was about books, but it wasn\u2019t just about books. Ideas spread. Literacy spiked. The elite monopoly on education and government started to crack. Luther\u2019s 95 Theses<\/em> were printed on a press, rocking Europe, and he issued “broadsheets.” Broadsheets became newspapers; newspapers enabled democracy. The printing press ushered in social, political, and economic sea changes. Gutenberg changed everything.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

WordPress has always been about websites, but it\u2019s not just about websites. It\u2019s about freedom, about possibility, and about carving out your own livelihood, whether it\u2019s by making a living through your site or by working in the WordPress ecosystem itself. We\u2019re democratizing publishing \u2014 and democratizing work \u2014 for everyone, regardless of language, ability, or economic wherewithal.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

WordPress\u2019s growth is impressive (28.5% and counting<\/a>) but it\u2019s not limitless \u2014 at least not in its current state. We have challenges (user frustrations with publishing and customizing, competition from site builders like Squarespace and Wix) and opportunities (the 157 million small businesses without sites, aka the next big market we should be serving). It\u2019s time for WordPress\u2019 next big thing, the thing that helps us deal with our challenges and opportunities. The thing that changes the world.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Gutenberg.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For those who don\u2019t know we kicked off the Gutenberg project around the beginning of the year, I talked about it and we did our first public releases in June<\/a>, and the team has been doing weekly updates<\/a> of the public beta plugin that’s available for anyone to try out in their wp-admin<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

When Johannes Gutenberg\u2019s press came out, people mostly used it to print the same religious text monks had been copying. It wasn\u2019t until ten or fifteen years later that people started innovating and trying their hands at new kinds of writing, and the wheels of change started to spin faster. Now it\u2019s WordPress\u2019 turn to do the same. Gutenberg meets our challenges and opportunities head on while simultaneously benefitting everyone who makes a living working in the WP ecosystem. It\u2019s about a lot more than just blocks. Our Gutenberg moves every part of the WordPress ecosystem forward:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Developers and agencies<\/strong> will be able to create interactive templates that clients can easily update without breaking things or dealing with custom post types: Imagine a custom \u201cemployee\u201d block that you can add to an About page that includes a picture, name, and bio. They\u2019ll be able to replace most meta boxes, and they\u2019ll get a chance to update old code or clients to work in this new paradigm.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Plugin developers<\/strong> will be able to completely integrate into every part of WordPress, including posts, pages, custom post types, and sidebars without having to hack TinyMCE or squeeze their entire feature behind a toolbar button. Today, every plugin that extends WordPress does it in a different way; Gutenberg\u2019s blocks provide a single, easy-to-learn entry point for an incredible variety of extensions. Some folks have already begun to port their plugins over, and are finding that they’re easier to build and have a much improved UI. I’m looking forward to highlighting those stories as we get further along and more people write about them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Theme developers<\/strong> won\u2019t need to bundle tons of plugins or create their own page builders. There\u2019ll be a standard, portable way to create rich layouts for posts and guide people through setup right in the interface, no 20-step tutorials or long videos needed. Every theme will be able to compete with multi-functional premium themes without locking users into a single theme or compromising their experience.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Core developers<\/strong> will be able to work in modern technologies and not worry about 15 years of backwards compatibility. We\u2019ll be able to simplify how menus, widgets, and the editor work to use a common set of code and concepts. The interface will be instantly responsive.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Web hosts<\/strong> will have better signup rates, as Gutenberg opens up WordPress to an entirely new set of people for whom WordPress was too complex and hard to set up before. (Remember our goal: to democratize publishing.) Their churn rates will go down: they\u2019ll stop bleeding customers to Wix, Weebly, and Squarespace, and fewer people will abandon their sites because it was too hard to make things look they way they wanted.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Users<\/strong> will finally be able to build the sites they see in their imaginations. They\u2019ll be able to do things on mobile they\u2019ve never been able to before. They\u2019ll never have to see a shortcode again. Text pasted from Word will get cleaned up and converted to blocks automatically and instantly. (I pasted the first version of this post from Google Docs and it worked great<\/em>. \ud83d\udc4c) They\u2019ll start manipulating their sites in ways that would have taken a developer. They\u2019ll be able to move from blogging to using WordPress as a CMS without missing a beat. Editing posts will just work; they\u2019ll write more. They\u2019ll learn blocks once, and then be able to instantly use and understand 90%+ of plugins.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I could go on about how photographers will be able to create rich galleries, parallax images, and better portfolios, or how poets will finally be able to preserve whitespace as they write, but you get the idea. It\u2019s big. It moves the WordPress ecosystem forward, but it also moves the whole web forward.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Which is scary! Because change always is, and this is a big one. But a scary thing is usually a thing that leads to growth, if you can push through it. Ten years ago, agencies and developers worried that software like WordPress would ruin their business because clients wouldn\u2019t need help updating their sites any more, and would maybe even just start building their own sites. But their worse fears didn\u2019t come true \u2014 instead, it created new opportunities for everyone.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

(People were worried when the printing press was invented, too. A Swiss biologist warned against the \u201cconfusing and harmful abundance of books,\u201d but I\u2019d say it all worked out in the end.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This is not to say that nothing will go sideways with Gutenberg, or that people\u2019s concerns about it are unfounded. Making something people want is really hard to do and easy to mess up \u2014 we definitely have in the past. I share many of the concerns or worries with today\u2019s version of Gutenberg, and we\u2019re working to mitigate them. Gutenberg will ship with WordPress 5.0, but the release will come out when Gutenberg is ready, not vice versa. We still have target dates to help us think about scope and plan for all the supporting documentation, translation, and marketing efforts, but we\u2019re not going to release anything until Gutenberg is something the team working on it agrees is ready.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And as we work, we\u2019re listening: feedback on core and feature plugins gets read, heard, and considered. Every review of Gutenberg, even the rude ones, has a response. Seven months of vigorous and public debate, chats, tickets, and code changesets brought us to where we are today, and there will be  a fair amount more before we can present the Gutenberg vision in a mostly-complete state. I welcome it; apathy would worry me a lot more than disagreement or controversy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Creating great software will never make every person happy. We\u2019re not creating The Perfect Product, we\u2019re choosing a path between many good options, weighing all of the inevitable trade-offs that come from a change, listening, shipping, and then doing it all over again. Iterating. My life\u2019s work is improving WordPress. I firmly believe that Gutenberg is the direction that will provide the most benefit to the maximum number of people while being totally in line with core WordPress\u2019s philosophies and commitment to user freedom. So keep giving us your feedback, and let\u2019s push through the fear together. It\u2019s worth a little discomfort to change the world.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Yes, it is a press, certainly, but a press from which shall flow in inexhaustible streams, the most abundant and most marvelous liquor that has ever flowed to relieve the thirst of men.<\/p>Johannes Gutenberg<\/cite><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Thank you to the WP Tavern conversation<\/a> that helped me write down many of these ideas, and Michelle Weber<\/a>. This post started in Google Docs then revised in Gutenberg 0.9.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Movable type was about books, but it wasn\u2019t just about books. Ideas spread. Literacy spiked. The elite monopoly on education and government started to crack. Luther\u2019s 95 Theses were printed on a press, rocking Europe, and he issued “broadsheets.” Broadsheets became newspapers; newspapers enabled democracy. The printing press ushered in social, political, and economic sea … Continue reading We Called it Gutenberg for a Reason<\/span> →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_crdt_document":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"fullscreen","default_image_id":54207,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"_wpas_customize_per_network":false},"categories":[2822,15,34],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-47503","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-best-of","category-essays","category-wordpress"],"parsely":{"version":"1.1.0","canonical_url":"https:\/\/ma.tt\/2017\/08\/we-called-it-gutenberg-for-a-reason\/","smart_links":{"inbound":0,"outbound":0},"traffic_boost_suggestions_count":0,"meta":{"@context":"https:\/\/schema.org","@type":"NewsArticle","headline":"We Called it Gutenberg for a Reason","url":"http:\/\/ma.tt\/2017\/08\/we-called-it-gutenberg-for-a-reason\/","mainEntityOfPage":{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"http:\/\/ma.tt\/2017\/08\/we-called-it-gutenberg-for-a-reason\/"},"thumbnailUrl":"","image":{"@type":"ImageObject","url":""},"articleSection":"Best Of","author":[{"@type":"Person","name":"Matt"}],"creator":["Matt"],"publisher":{"@type":"Organization","name":"Matt Mullenweg","logo":"http:\/\/ma.tt\/files\/2021\/05\/Photo-on-2020-10-28-at-2.05-PM-1.jpg"},"keywords":[],"dateCreated":"2017-08-28T02:23:40Z","datePublished":"2017-08-28T02:23:40Z","dateModified":"2025-11-01T20:06:45Z"},"rendered":"