WordPress, after years of being a bit plodding and carefully backwards compatible, will be rolling out Gutenberg soon, starting with the editor, then moving on using Gutenberg for plugins and themes. Gutenberg will change how WordPress works, making it simultaneously easier to use and more powerful. Everything will be based on blocks. Blocks are reusable. Using blocks in the editor means instead of having one long stream of text with maybe an image or video, a post can be highly customized and more visually appealing. Let’s say you review books. With Gutenberg you can create a book review block to put in the post, with colors, text, areas for the image and link to the book ready to go. This way, book reviews will have a standardized look that also can easily be changed, just update the book review block.
People who were skeptical of Gutenberg no longer are after seeing a demo for it at WordCamp US 2017. They are now excited about it. Yes, Gutenberg will break things. Older themes and plugins may need to be updated or will simply become obsolete.
WordPress is making a bold move with Gutenberg. Good.
With Gutenberg we can start enforcing common design patterns and layouts in post content. As someone who knows the importance of consistency and good design — and can’t design — I love this development so much.
Gutenberg is making it easier for regular users to “draw within the lines” and create content that looks great. Matias also showed that the editor now warns you if you use color pairings that have insufficient color contrast or skip heading levels. This is awesome from an accessibility standpoint – in fact, the room started clapping.
—Matias also showed off how easy it will be to convert a block or group of blocks in a post into a reusable block. Being able to create a design element inside of post content and with a few clicks be able to reuse it in another post is also very exciting: think call to actions, promotions, product embeds, etc.
—In Morten’s mind, and Matt seemed to endorse this in State of the Word, blocks will go everywhere and replace these tired concepts — header, footer, sidebar, etc. By creating these things out of blocks, users can start to define where they put blocks — on the page, in 3D space or even which device.
This is all super exciting. Having a block as something standard that works anywhere you put it or your user puts it will make a WordPress site into a platform.