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Comment by pupppet | Hacker News Reader

I’ve easily built hundreds of WP sites and Gutenberg makes me sad. Anyone raving about the block editor has clearly never used one of WP’s paid page builder plugins like Beaver Builder and Elementor, they’re in a whole different league. You of course can continue using these plugins, but the absolute chasm in quality separating these plugins and Gutenberg highlights Automattic doesn’t have the technical or design know-how to push WP forward. And with WP being my bread and butter, that’s a little scary.

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I've used most of them: FusionBuilder, WPBakery/Visual Composer, Elementor. I honestly despise these page editors. They are so incredibly slow, and the markup they produce is indecipherable.

I've been pretty happy with Gutenberg. It has some pain points - notably around block recovery - but it produces sane HTML, its CSS payload is minimal, and there's no frontend JS at all (at least in the default blocks).

You don't get the millions of features of those other editors, but it's those same features that make them slow and cumbersome. I think Gutenberg strikes a good balance. It's the first page editor I don't hate.

Why use elementor when you can get far better Google Core Web Vitals, and actually write semantic html all with ACF?

Writing PHP isn’t that hard!

A drag and drop page builder can churn out a page in a fraction of the time and many plugins generate fairly decent HTML, it’s rarely worth coding from scratch any more.

This is such a terrible take. Drag and drop page builders produce terrible HTML. Completely unsemantic, and they will always fail Google's core web vital metrics.

Agreed. Gutenberg was 3-4 years too late, and in that time period visual builders were created, refined and became standard for our build process. We chose Divi, and have invested a great deal of time in the platform. With Divi we have both a Gutenberg replacement AND a full-site-editor. I also use Beaver Builder and Elementor - they're all better than Gutenberg and have robust development teams and frequent release schedules.

I don't really care about the markup output like other folks - but I do care about fragmentation. The worst period in WordPress was pre-Gutenberg when all these different page builders were competing for WordPress market share. Offering a consistent user experience is crucial for the long-term health of WordPress and that's the best thing that Gutenberg has brought to it.

LOL you just mentioned the worst thing that could happen to wordpress for client-side work. These plugins are a hot mess of unneeded feature. The amount of code and conditions they create to do something you could solve in a line or two of CSS is appalling. The markup they output is some of the worst, bloated, unreadable markup I've ever read.

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