Comment by dmje | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dmje | Hacker News Reader

The thing I want to see, above all else (and it is coming, but slowly and without any kind of apparent over-arching strategy - which it badly needs) is designer / developer control.

Gutenberg gives remarkable agency to editors, which from one angle is great - lovely to be able to add a column, shift a block upwards, pad that image over to the right without any technical skills.

On the other... I don't know a web designer in the world who wants to give their editors complete control. And rightly so. Web design - good web design (and by proxy, UX) - is about constraint as much as it is about freedom. Probably more so. Knowing what not to include, and when not to include it, is the single skill that a great visual / web designer brings to the table.

So to see interfaces like Gutenberg where anyone can ...shift, adapt, grow, shrink, add to, remove... pretty much any element in the interface - is a total disaster.

Here's how "clever" it has become (and it is, technically, and in a fun sense - clever) - you can go into the edit screen of your Gutenberg website, and then you can pull up a tab to the "Block Pattern Directory" [1], hover over any block in the list, copy it, then jump back into your website and paste it. Wow.

Even if (and man, it isn't) that list of block patterns was beautifully, thoughtfully designed, what kind of awful, awful FrankenDesign is going to result from your client taking a random smattering of block patterns and pasting them into pages on their site?

As I said, there are slow steps appearing around being able to lock blocks and block patterns - but WordPress should have been much, much more thoughtful about being open, up-front and strategic with their acknowledgement of this. I know many WordPress designers who have upped and left to look at other platforms because they need client constraint, not "ultimate freedom".

[1] https://wordpress.org/patterns/

I hesitate to even post here about my software, but "web designer first" is a key idea behind the CMS I've worked on for some time now.

https://archetypewebsites.com/

A key premise is that the designer decides where things go, and the content editors really just want forms to fill out to get content where the designer says it should go. But like any system, there is full WYSIWYG editable regions as well. (where the pink blinky text will show up...)

I've not marketed Archetype widely (but I went through Startup School a few times with YC) because of the same reasons every other developer has, Archetype has warts.

"Shameless plug" We're all shilling something. Be proud of what you've made

That's kind of you, I appreciate that. I think I am going to redo some things to target the market it serves better and maybe I will post a "Show HN" here.

That was also my initial reaction (read: disappointment) to Gutenberg. So much so, I opened an issue on GitHub, the reply was (effectively), "What's a style guide?". That wasn't a good sign.

As for progress, the fact that you still can't define color combo pallets is (to put it kindly) weird. It like the GB Core team forgot about MySpace and what happens when the design-blind have no guardrails.

Yes, it kinda getting better. But it still feels like too much trust and responsibility is put on the user and not the tool. It's like having a text input on a form for email and not doing validation because well...you trust people will get it right. Who does that in 2020+?

The last couple of years has been a reminder of how much WP .com means to Automattic. And how little other use cases (e.g., content entered via say ACF because that's all the client wants / needs) matter to them.

For me at least, Craft CMS answers many of the problems you describe here. I can't see WP as anything but a dumpster fire in comparison.

I remember reading through books teaching wordpress and all of them had a variation of the line to not to go trying to change or tinker too much with the inner files that make up wordpress. It kind of reminded me of how the obelisk aliens from the 2001: A space odyssey’s sequel 2010 tells humans that they can have everything in the solar system except Jupiter.

> I don't know a web designer in the world who wants to give their editors complete control.

I'm thinking this might be aimed squarely at scenarios where the editor, designer and admin are all the same person.

Some truth in that, for sure. I think they're clearly aiming at the Squarespace / Wix market which is probably the scenario you describe.

Yes, that market via an overhaul of WordPress.com.

> I know many WordPress designers who have upped and left to look at other platforms because they need client constraint, not "ultimate freedom".

This is a reason why some build custom themes and blocks

That's what we do. But (at least until now, it's slowly changing...) you could still take a beautifully designed theme and butcher it by doing some of the things I describe above.

As developer / designer there are multiple ways to lock things down and provide a design system for content creators.

https://gutenbergtimes.com/how-to-disable-theme-features-and...

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