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Comment by partiallypro | Hacker News Reader

I think the oddest part of Automattic's handling of this is that they are ramming this through, skirting a lot of quality controls such as accessibility (something they recently canned to meet deadline) but yet have the minimum requirement for Wordpress on very much dead PHP versions, 5.2-5.4. They also claim to be community driven, yet...they aren't even listening to the community on this. It's wild. I guess maybe their overall goal is to make Wordpress.com a highly successful SaaS and the open source portion is a secondary thought because it isn't profit driven. In any case, this could turn out to be a massive disaster for Wordpress. As a long time Wordpress developer, I am highly concerned. I think it has tons of potential if one right...but the handling of it has been shady, at best.

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People don't like change. If you think you have a good idea, and you want to incorporate it into a product, you'll often find push back. Especially in the case that it has widespread affects. If you nail it you will hear all sorts of praise, if you fail - ridicule and insults.

They are trying to push forward with what they think is a good idea, and best for the products future. Doesn't mean they're right, however there is the argument that the customer doesn't know their experience could be improved.

Time will tell in the WordPress case.

None of which has anything to do with having a double standard. If you ran your project with backwards compatibility as a core value and promise to your users then don't be surprised if they get upset when you break that promise.

It can be good to recognize that back-compat has become detrimental. When that happens, you need to communicate the reasons why you have decided to break it and communicate that the projects values have changed going forward. It doesn't sound like either of those things have happened here.

Please check out my "State of the Word" presentation from 2016 and 2017, I tried to make the best case I could for why, perhaps once a decade, it is worthwhile to trade backwards compatibility for future relevancy. The reason I have personally not advocated for that trade-off before was that the reward on the other side was not worth it, but with Gutenberg we have a huge opportunity, and incredible user demand demonstrated by the adoption of the beta plugin, that I think makes it #worthit.

Accessibility has been worked on since the beginning of Gutenberg. If "Automattic" just wanted to be more competitive or operate for its own commercial benefit, it would have been 10x easier and faster to just do Gutenberg on WordPress.com and not do it core-first. Gutenberg being in core means every WordPress host in the world (that all compete with Automattic) will get access to it. It's not proprietary, it's open source. It works with all the plugins and themes out there. It works with the hundreds of billions of posts that have been written in the past 15 years of WordPress. It's community-first.

You know what Gutenberg doesn’t work with? People. It’s filled with mystery meat navigation and animations. And it’s a resource hog. It’s typical of almost all modern JS heavy interfaces I’ve come across. I’m loathing the thought of moving clients and coworkers over to it.

I say this as someone who loves WordPress and has been developing on it since 2006. I’ve also been working in UX and UI for ten years. I’m hoping for the best, but bracing for the worst.

We're definitely working on making it more efficient, and will continue to. We tested with WaitButWhy posts that are 50k+ words. In the old WYSIWYG it wouldn't even load, Gutenberg can parse and load it in a few seconds.

That's just false. Just because it's open source doesn't mean Automattic doesn't want to turn into a SqaureSpace model. There is no doubt in my mind that the pivot and ramming through of Gutenberg is because they are scared of things like SquareSpace and feel they need to evolve fast. They do need to evolve, but they also need to stop cutting corners and listen to the community...It won't be long (it might already be true) that the "Classic Editor" plugin will have more active installs than any other plugin in the repo. That's a LOUD message from the community that "this is not ready!" I have sites that are Gutenberg compatible but I still have the classic editor on, because it's a giant mess.

Gutenberg from my experience is a server hog compared to the classical Wordpress. It's harder on database servers and on memory. Yet they won't even change their PHP practices to make it 7+ requirement.

There's also facts: Gutenberg plugin adoption is growing faster than Classic Editor adoption, so it's not likely it will have more active installs than any other plugin. But even if it did, that's okay, we're supporting it. It's not a failing of Gutenberg, just showing that people for whatever reason don't want change.

AFAIK there is no change to database or memory usage post-Gutenberg, especially since pretty much all of the new code executes on the client side when you edit a post. It may use more memory in your browser, but not anything that should cause issues.

The conclusion that sites installing the Classic Editor won't adopt to Gutenberg has a logical flaw. The Classic Editor is also used for sites, that are not "ready" for Gutenberg because it uses plugins that haven't gone through a full compatibility tests or where the site owner decided not to jump on the first version of WordPress 5.0 and waits until the kinks are out, say until 5.0.2 or 5.0.3. So there might be a lot more installs of the Classic Editor plugin coming, just because of this normal hesitance to jump on a new software feature out of the gate.

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