I fully agree with that. It’s like a scalpel for people who have no medical skills.
“You’re a gardner, but want to perform a surgery? No problem! With this special scalpel you can take any organ out of a body you like”
The patient will probably die or at least become disabled for the rest of his life, but hey, you as a gardner performed a real surgery 😉
Hiya,
So your primary concern is with the layout, if I understood it right, well do I have great news or what!
Gutenberg extends on the concept of page templates (if you’re not familiar with them, they allow theme creators to have different ways of displaying content based on a dropdown on a page), by introducing post templates (is that the official name, I honestly don’t know, they’re just referred to as Templates, but I prefer the more direct wording, to avoid confusion).
This means theme creators may pre-define how posts and pages should look (this means plugins that add custom post types are also able to do this without hacky back routes!). They can declare what blocks can be used, have blocks with placeholder content be in there by default, and lock which ones can be removed etc.
This means users have a better UI for setting up their content, but still follow the design guidelines as defined by the theme. You can read more about it at https://ww.wp.xz.cn/gutenberg/handbook/templates/
Was there any aspects of Gutenberg you liked, when looking past the freedom users are given with their content?
Marius, I don’t see the point really. Theme creators may pre-define how posts and pages should look, declare what blocks can be used and eventually block them.
I didn’t dive into that kind of options, but I believe you completely on that. Nevertheless it sounds like doing the same thing we are already doing, only in a completely different way. So yes, I see the big change here, and no, I don’t see the additional value over what’s already there.
And on top of that (as I also explain in my own review), in my case I work with people who only need to change the ‘raw’ content of the blocks. At most they need to be able to select another content type. And like I said, that can already be done without Gutenberg. I don’t want these people to touch the styling, just the content. So ‘freedom’ is an overrated value here. I don’t want them to have this freedom. People want simpel, easy and intuitive interfaces. And “simpel and easy” means per defenition “restrictions”. Which is freedoms mean nephew.
And finally, it has (in a lesser way) the same problem that pagebuilders have: It can turn website migrations or theme changes to enormous projects because the content is polluted with all kinds of styling code which shouldn’t be there. And yes, I noticed that lots of the Gutenberg code is wrapped in HTML comments. This does make it more harmless in other situations, but it also makes a realy clean fresh start almost impossible. The dust has not been removed, it has only been swept under the rug in the livingroom 😉
