WordPress is more than a blogging platform. It also powers very large enterprise WordPress websites that don’t look like blogs. WordPress VIP hosts such sites. One example is FiveThirtyEight. Minimum price is $5,000 a month. They comment on just-released WordPress 5.0 with the Gutenberg editor, about where WordPress is going next, and what that means for the enterprise.
Everything is or will be a block.
Blocks can be anything from a paragraph in a post to the entire post, or even an entire CMS. Blocks are powerful, easy to work with, drag-and-drop, can be embedded in other blocks. The ultimate goal in WordPress is everything will work via blocks. Among other things, this means way less problems with rogue or squabbling plugins.
WordPress is all-in on blocks.
They reflect the reality of HTML structure, making it (finally!) possible to meet user expectations on things like copy-and-paste from applications like word processors. But as developers we’re able to simplify their presentation, make their function readily apparent to users, and make them reusable across the interface.
Blocks will be the default way to configure a site
Right now, blocks are only in the editor. They will soon be in plugins, menus, and themes. Editing everything in the front end becomes a possibility.
Blocks will break out of the text box.
Blocks might replace what we currently know as ‘widgets’ and ‘menus’. Configuration would take place within the WordPress admin area, in the Customizer – or perhaps even inline, on the front end.
Major advantages coming for the enterprise
Plans include editing content at the block levels and multi-language as a part of the core. This means multiple people can edit different parts of the same post without issues and multi-language becomes part of enterprise WordPress.
Phase three is set to focus on collaboration and workflows. It is likely to include content locking based on blocks, rather than pages as now. This will be especially valuable to newsrooms working on breaking stories: we know many of our clients already have elaborate workarounds to allow journalists to work on different parts of the same article simultaneously.
Phase four will finally bring an official way for WordPress to support multilingual publishing. Numerous proven approaches already exist, of course. But the lack of a canonical solution within WordPress core is often cited as a weakness, and existing solutions often cannot guarantee to be compatible with other plugins and services.