All the views in this post are my personal views and do not reflect necessarily those of WordPress, or WordPress.org or WordPress.com
Guttenberg is a WordPress project for adding a page builder into the core WordPress code, rather than the content editor we have now.
Now, it is not the first page-builder for WordPress. Many great add-ons have been written to offer amazing Pagebuilder features to WordPress. Some I like, and some I don’t. The greatest feature of WordPress and one of the major factors to its success is the proliferation of great plugins and themes designed by developers from around the world. However, this is not true to all of the WordPress ecosystem. The sites on WordPress.org, that are hosted by Automattic, do not allow many of the plugins and did not have a page builder. Rather than choose one of the plugins already created, they moved to have a page-builder function built into the core WordPress code. Companies like Squarespace and WIX, have inferior offerings in relation to costs and features but do have easier to use page builders. The community decided to fight back with a core installed page-builder.
As with anything major in WordPress; Adding code to the core is a slow process and will be a compromise. Guttenberg is not going to match the most brilliant page builders already in use by millions of sites on self-hosted WordPress sites. It is also going to be the most major update WordPress since the development of woocommerce and will affect everyone. All plugin developers have to look at their code and try to incorporate the changes that Guttenberg deliver. The biggest being the interaction with the new live mode style interface.
- Guttenberg had to happen. There is a need for a better live editor/page builder function within WordPress and available out of the box.
- The skills required to write fully integrated plugins has now increased which may reduce the number of high-quality products, but then there has always been a big difference between the great, the good and the mediocre.
- This still does not address the problem of Super-Theme-builders creating goodish looking and poor working and performing applications.
WordPress Core is late to the party with these revisions and they are not yet good enough to beat off the competition they wished to match. But the development community is still way ahead.
- The boom of page-builders is more 2015/2016.
- We have many theme builders dominate in 2017/2018.
- We are in the boom of Sales Funnels approach for many in 2018.
- Already the move to dedicated mobile coded and personalised sites is growing. I predict that this will boom into 2019.
