Looking for perspective on Gutenburg

• clarose098

• October 4, 2022 at 6:44 pm

As a designer and developer I’ve found WordPress & ACF the perfect balance for many of our clients. It provides enough flexibility and restraint. And most importantly allows us to craft with ADA and information architecture in mind.

When Gutenburg first released we were in the camp of deactivate it until it’s further polished. I ran the current WordPress 2022 theme on my local and realized the time had come to give it a whirl. So I designed and built a site using purely Gutenburg and over writing some styles.

The deal breaker for me is that its just not very responsive and over-riding it seems messy. Maybe I missing something, but injecting ACF fields into the builder or adding custom blocks with react solves some issues, but it felt like reaching the same level of polish takes more work and leaves more questions then answers.

As Gutenburg evolves I see it becoming more plausible. Adding responsive breakpoints where you can adapt the settings would be huge. It would solve a portion of the current challenges I faced.

Right now if I had to make a choice I’d disable Gutenburg and continue with ACF the way we have. But I have fears of how sustainable this is. How long will the old way be supported and is it the right decision? Just curious if anyone else has encountered this. I just want to make sure I am not overreacting to change and to give this new process a proper go.

Curious to get other peoples take. Here are some of the sites we’ve developed with ACF and WordPress and the kind of experience we want to continue delivering for our clients. Some examples are using WordPress as a headless CMS.

https://theebco.com/
https://wearethirdear.com/
https://wearetane.com/

• John Huebner

• October 9, 2022 at 11:19 am

Here is my perspective on guberbug, can you tell by what I call it.

I made the decision when it was first added that I will disable it and continue with ACF. There is nothing in ACF that should not work for the foreseeable future.

WP is not changing its underlying functionality. Custom fields continue to work. Nothing in the database or anything to do with post/term/user meta is being changed.

Guberbug puts everything involved with blocks into post_content. I don’t see that changing. Until they make a major over-hall of the DB I don’t see most of how WP works changing. This major over-hall is simply never going to happen because that would mean rebuilding WP from the ground up.

Not only do I disable guberbug, but I also remove the classic editor from all post types as well and I only use ACF fields. This eliminates the possible future where WP disables classic editor on posts completely. They will continue, I believe, to allow post types to not support guberbug and for developers to build their own admins for custom post types. There are many examples of this in existing plugins where post types do not have content editors at all and depend on only custom fields. I also feel that ACF will always support a WYSIWYG editor in some form.