Howdy David!

Thanks for stopping by – I really appreciate your thoughtful comment!

I imagine you and I are actually aligned in our perspectives, even if we’re not aligned in our current practices! By using words like “potential”, “infancy”, and “lean into” – I hope I communicated a degree of caution and even “early days” for where Gutenberg is at compared to more established page builders. In fact, you and I would be very much in agreement that the approach outlined in this post is not easier than most page builders. We’re not there…yet.

But I do think that gap will continue to get smaller and smaller until we’re all happily editing our sites, on the front-end of the site, with Gutenberg.

(p.s. for what it’s worth – no additional css was added for this pattern – but point taken, that’s often part of it!)

Don’t get me wrong, I too expect Gutenberg will eventually replace page builders.

But at the moment, even with these improvements, it’s still nowhere as usable as even genuinely crusty old page builders like Aveda or WPBakery.

My main criteria for authoring platforms is how easily one can train a small-business client to use the interface to create their own content.

With Beaver Builder (or, I’m sure, Elementor) I can usually do this in about half an hour. Including walking them through logging in. Over the phone. I rarely need to have follow up training.

Gutenberg isn’t there yet. I’m sure it will get there, and I’m really looking forward to it! But seriously, someone who says “this is so much easier than page builders, you just have to open functions.php and…” may not be the best arbiter of the word “easy.” Nor of the capabilities of the average marketing department.

Half an hour for training. Over the phone. That’s when Gutenberg will be the death of page builders.

I truly can’t wait. And I appreciate your enthusiasm! But this isn’t it just yet.

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Nope! Just WP eCommerce

Basically each page has its own design, top to bottom, that overrides any theme styling anyways. Taken to its logical conclusion, themes would become obsolete.

That said, I don’t have the impression that Gutenberg goes nearly as far in this direction.

Hi Nico!

Sure, that makes sense. I wonder, does it work in the use case mentioned in this blog post if the trailing slash is removed from the version string? That seems odd, as the core standard for the version string property is to include the trailing slash.

John, the fine folks at Zao always made me feel like part of the team. I enjoyed working with them and it is really nice that they don’t try to hide the fact that they partner with people. I’ve been given so many company email addresses throughout my freelance career in hopes to disguise the fact I was a contractor. It’s nice to not have to pretend.