Please note: This is an opinion piece by Scott Bowler and does not count as an official statement by ClassicPress.
I would like to put a topic to bed. Dislike of WordPress Gutenberg can not be interpreted as a fear of change, to make this claim is disingenuous and demeans the person this claim is directed at.
People who have made their career selling, maintaining, designing and building websites are in a constant state of flux and the vast majority of us are excited to discover, try and learn new technologies. In fact, the ability to embrace change for the benefit of our customers needs to be in our DNA, otherwise we will fail to innovate, compete and earn new business.
On a personal level, I love change so much that my daily routine involves jumping onto ProductHunt at 8am GMT every day (this is when the new products go live) to check out what's new - to see what I can embrace to improve my own workflows or improve the performance of my customer's campaigns. My evening routine involves browsing HackerNews, a variety of subreddits (/r/Laravel, /r/WordPress, /r/PHP), dipping into dev.to and of course chatting with people about ClassicPress.
When I'm not developing with WordPress/ClassicPress, I use the Laravel framework. I was on the BETA waiting list for Laravel Nova since it was announced a few months ago, and had adopted it into new projects within weeks of its launch. Why? Because it is absolutely fantastic! I've dedicated many hours to learning this new tool.
When talking to other people involved with the ClassicPress project I see the same passion for discovery and change on a daily basis. We LOVE change. ClassicPress itself shows a willingness and eagerness to embrace change. Dedicating hundreds of volunteer hours to building something new, building a new approach to community, building novel solutions, building a new brand (the list goes on) - all of this is a massive change from sticking with the status-quo and pushing forward with WordPress.
To say that I don't like Gutenberg because I don't like change is, quite frankly, ridiculous. I don't like Gutenberg because it's UX is horrendous. I don't like Gutenberg because it's buggy. I don't like Gutenberg because it's being forced into core and I'd prefer it to stay as a plugin. I don't like Gutenberg because it's going to cost my business hundreds of man hours in retraining, support calls and slower workflows.
The next time you accuse a Gutenberg naysayer of being "afraid of change", perhaps it's time for a moment of reflection.... Perhaps they're not scared of change - perhaps there is good reason why they don't like Gutenberg. Perhaps you should dig deeper and try and put yourself in their shoes.
It's worth trying change, right?
Top comments (4)
In some situations people definitely won't change because they're scared or because it is difficult.
Making a significant update to a widely used tool is always going to be controversial. And I suppose you have to expect the developers of the 'change' are going to defend their decision. Even if ultimately their decision was a bad one.
My main gripe with WordPress, if you exclude all the legacy and security issues, is they have refused to integrate with Composer in any way. So more and more developers are hacking together WordPress / Composer based solutions which will ultimately undermine the WordPress project entirely unless WordPress embrace Composer.
As your post highlights it's clear a number of splits are beginning to occur in the community.
ClassicPress is embracing composer - for a start you will be able to install ClassicPress using it
Well that would be a step forward.
at least you hate it because it is buggy, I hate for different technical reasons and community/project management 😂
Already explained on dev.to/mte90/why-i-have-chosen-to-...