Reply To: ACF vs Gutenberg in 2020

• John Huebner

• June 19, 2020 at 5:23 am

Are you looking for input? Sounds that way.

I did all of the research and for me there is never a time to use the Gutenberg.

Reason 1) When I build a site it is for clients that simply want to add content. They want to have me, the developer decide how that content gets displayed. Not only do they not want to manage the look and feel of their site but it would be against the companies style guide to do so. The people working on the content may not know what is included in these style guides and the company has no interest in teaching them and monitoring what they do. They don’t want to suddenly see a page with a splash of pink because some intern thought it would look cool. The client depends on me to insure that the site looks professional and that every page has a constant look and field.

Reason 2) When I build a site it is for clients that simply want to enter content. They are use to using applications like Microsoft Word and that’s the way they want to work. When id comes to text they want to just copy and paste it. When it comes to images they want to just upload them. They depend on my to ensure that this text and images go in exactly the right place to maintain a consistent look and feel on every page of their site. Many clients do not want to learn, nor do they have time to learn, and some are not even capable of learning something more complicated. If they can’t figure it out just by looking at it then it is too damn complicated. This is the same reason that I don’t use “Page Builders”.

Reason 3) Many of my clients what advanced sorting and filtering capabilities that are simply not available in WP. This advanced filtering and searching requires the existence of fields that can be queried by.

Reason 4) My client’s do not want to pay a small fortune to have a site developed that includes reasons 1, 2 and 3. While it may be possible the process of doing so in Reacte would take considerably more time to accomplish. I cannot eat that time so I must pass the extra cost on to my clients. If I want to continue to get new clients then I have to keep my prices reasonable. The main reason for me to use ACF in the first place is to reduce dev time.

Reason 5) If my client’s wanted to do the work themselves and wanted a wix site or any other of the sites where they can do it themselves then I would send theme there and not waste my time. I build professional sites for large professional companies.