Although I have 20+ years of programming everything from BASIC to C++ to PHP under my belt, I am currently learning and developing in WordPress and I am VERY excited about it.
As I roll up my sleeves to dig in, I am faced with the choice of which editing platform to use. I initially decided on Page Builder by SiteOrigin, which is an excellent choice, I am now thinking I should switch to Gutenberg and this is article explains why.
About 15 years ago, I was faced with the decision of which CMS to use. I remember evaluating Joomla vs. Drupal. I don’t remember WordPress which makes sense as it was in its early infancy. I chose Joomla because it was intuitive to me and I was impressed by the number of excellent plugins available. Looking back now, I should have seen WordPress coming up in popularity and switched a few years down the line as I ran into various Joomla issues that I feel were addressed by WordPress and in my opinion, WordPress is the right choice for a CMS today. What I was missing in the decision making process then is not so much what was what may be and so I have decided to evaluate WordPress editors in terms of how they might evolve in the next few years to come.
Gutenberg is a block-based editing environment that has been released with WordPress 5.0 and many people are split on what they think of it. Luckily the old editor will be available for the next few years as a plugin. This release, however, is just a part of future planned releases, so Gutenberg will just get better and more powerful because of the sheer number of developers fine-tuning it.
Gutenberg is based all on blocks. Everything is a block. Whereas previous editors had widgets, shortcodes, buttons, embeds, etc. Everything in Gutenberg is a block with a standard and compatible interface, yet every block’s layout and settings can be customized.