Dear fellow WordPress developers, it’s time to give up Classic WordPress.
I know, I know. But Gutenberg has been the core editor since December 2018. And I agree with you! When Gutenberg first came out I wanted nothing to do with it either. It was not ready for prime time, there were a lot of things wrong or downright broken with it, and it hardly fit into any sort of regular WordPress build. But the fact of the matter is that Gutenberg has been out for nearly six years now, and it’s really shined up to something great.
Now, I’m not saying that the site you’ve had on life support that hasn’t had a theme update since 2010 needs to roll into Gutenberg – absolutely not, that site is hanging on by a thread and introducing something with so many features into it is going to break it in so many ways you won’t be prepared for. What I’m saying is you need to give up Classic WordPress as your go-to for site builds.
If you’re still building with the classic editor and Gutenberg turned off in 2024, you’re depriving your customers and clients of helpful and useful features they can use to do-it-themselves. And you’re delivering to them a brand new site that is already six (or more) years out of date.
Maybe that is in fact what some of you want. I’ve certainly come across many many WordPress developers who want their customers tied to them for every little thing and with good reasoning. As a marketer, I should be saying “good for them!” because they are maximizing their income by not allowing clients to do-it-themselves. But it feels kind of underhanded, doesn’t it? I want clients to pay me for things they don’t have the time or knowledge to do. I don’t want them to come to me because there’s a tiny typo on a page, or because they decided that they didn’t want that award to be shown on their about page. I mean, it’s great when they do, but I don’t want them to ever feel like they need to throw money at me and then wait who knows how long to have it completed – I like giving clients control and the knowledge that with their site they can do just about anything.
I think that’s a good way to do business. I try my best to not build sites that clients get frustrated with because they need to pay someone else to do very basic things with it – because when that happens, they just bounce to somewhere like SquareSpace or, ick, Wix or Weebly, because those builders do allow them the amount of control that they desperately seek. I personally want all my clients to love WordPress and never leave, and I’ll do whatever I can to help them get there.
As WordPress developers, we all know that maximizing the ability for our customers to do-it-themselves is a double-edged sword. The best we can do is provide the best and safest environment for a robust interface. And I think that in 2024, since so much of Gutenberg is now part of core, integrating it with your favorite templates is not as much of a to-do as you may think.
With full site editing becoming a thing, adopting Gutenberg will be like the bridge to help you get there.
So what do you say? Can you put in a couple of hours to revise your favorite templates to be inclusive of Gutenberg?
All it takes to start is a little
add_filter('use_block_editor_for_post', '__return_true');
add_filter( 'use_block_editor_for_post_type', '__return_true', 100 );