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Jeff Chandler

A Collection of Gutenberg Conversations, Resources, and Videos

Since the conclusion of WordCamp US in early December, there have been a number of Gutenberg related items published to the web.

The following is a collection of items related to Gutenberg that I came across throughout December. Feel free to add to this list in the comments below.

Resources

Getting Ready for Gutenberg is a community-run initiative to help users and developers prepare for Gutenberg's inclusion in core.

GitHub repo filled with Gutenberg example blocks.

Although it was published in August of last year, WordImpress has a good guide on how to contribute to Gutenberg without code.

Rich Tabor explains how to add WordPress theme styles to Gutenberg. He's also created a Gutenberg Social Sharing Block plugin.

Human Made published a Gutenberg White Paper that introduces people to the project, goes over a number of blocks, and provides advice on how agencies can prepare for the transition.

Frontenberg is a new project by Tom Nowell that brings Gutenberg to the front end. This allows people to try Gutenberg without logging into a site or installing a plugin.

Ben Gilbanks has added basic support for Gutenberg to his Granule starter theme.

Andrew Taylor created a Gutenberg block that enables embedding Pens from CodePen.

Advanced Custom Fields announced it will focus on making ACF compatible with Gutenberg in 2018.

Meta Box has also announced its Gutenberg compatibility plans.

John Hawkins published a good post on the WebDevStudios blog on how existing content will be affected by Gutenberg.

Conversations

Kevin Hoffman started a conversation on how plugin conflicts can be handled and communicated.

Bridget Willard shared her concerns with the economic impact and timeline of Gutenberg's roll out. She also created an issue on GitHub.

Amanda Rush published her thoughts and concerns related to Gutenberg's Accessibility.

Morten Rand-Hendrisken published a series of articles on LinkedIn covering things you need to know about Gutenberg and the conditions for its success.

Scott Kingsley Clark, of the PODS framework plugin, announced they're doing some cool things in the next release specifically for Gutenberg.

Freemius takes a look at what Gutenberg means for the future of commercial WordPress products. The post includes quotes from Beaver Builder, Elementor, and Visual Composer.

In episode 297 of WordPress Weekly, Morten Rand-Hendriksen joined John James Jacoby and I in a detailed conversation about Gutenberg, its potential impacts, and the idea of forking WordPress.

GiveWP is opening up its design process for how its product will interface with Gutenberg.

Beaver Builder takes a look at Page Builders in a Gutenberg World, the future of WordPress, and how its product will embrace compatibility with Gutenberg.

Eric Mann on Gutenberg and the road ahead. Mann supports the idea of soft-forking WordPress to provide time and help for those who can't immediately update to 5.0.

Help contribute to Gutenberg by processing the usability tests from WordCamp US 2017.

Michael Hebenstreit details the potential costs for small WordPress businesses and independent developers to transition to Gutenberg.

WordCamp Miami 2018 is having a developer workshop focused on Gutenberg.

Tammie Lister shared her experience redesigning her site using the Gutenberg theme as a base.

WP4Good explains how they're preparing for Gutenberg.

Videos

Riad Benguella published a visual example that shows Meta Boxes mostly work in Gutenberg. Benguella created a sample plugin called Gutenberg Custom Fields that provides a similar user experience to existing Custom Fields plugins.

A live demo of Gutenberg during the 2017 State of the Word.

Gutenberg and the WordPress of Tomorrow by Morten Rand-Hendriksen

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15 responses to “A Collection of Gutenberg Conversations, Resources, and Videos”

  1. Thanks so much for the mention! :)

    I have to admit, we went from nervous speculation to having a whole bunch of fun strategizing about the future of WordPress, Gutenberg, and Beaver Builder. 2018 is fixing to be a very exciting year…

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  3. There’s still no step-by-step guide (for dummies) on how to convert a plugin that registers some (now old) meta fields (a textarea, a dropdown and an image select field, for example) to use a Gutenberg template with some fixed blocks. No, there’s nothing like that on the Gutenberg Handbook.

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  5. This is an awesome list of resources, Jeff! Thanks for that. 💯

    I’d like to mention (shameless plug) one of my projects:

    — Gutenberg Boilerplate: Easy to understand and extensively inline documented starter WordPress plugin for the new Gutenberg editor.

    — WPTavern’s article about it: Gutenberg Boilerplate Demonstrates How to Build Custom Blocks →

    About 500 developers have used this project, the intent was to write a few blocks and then extensively inline document them. With ~400 stargazers this is one of my most popular free and open source software repo over there at GitHub.

    🤔 P.S. It has also helped me understand what developers are really looking for when they start building Gutenberg Blocks. So, I am releasing a sister project next week. I hope it’s worth it.

    Peace! ✌️

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  6. Hi Jeff, many thanks for the mention and this great overview of Gutenberg related information. It’s encouraging to see that the documentation and tutorials for Gutenberg are constantly evolving. That will definitely help developers prepare for the major changes related to Gutenberg.

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  8. Great list of resources! I used a lot of these when building our first custom block.

    I would like to say Ahmad’s Gutenberg Boilerplate plugin was an extremely helpful resource as well.

    We recently released our first custom block on Organic Themes for creating personal profiles. I documented the process of building the Profile Block, and we have released it as a free download, https://organicthemes.com/create-custom-block-wordpress-gutenberg/

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    • That’s very kind of you to say! 💯

      I’m so excited to be able to help people move ahead with the Gutenberg project. I have a new project that I’ll be launching in a couple of days which will make it easier for devs to prototype with Gutenberg.

      Cheers!

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  9. I just got through writing the following to Chris Lema in response to his post here — http://chrislema.com/talking-gutenberg-wordpress/

    —————-

    I don’t think you are confused at all Chris.

    No sir, not one little bit confused.

    The people who seem confused to me (and maybe you too) are Matt, Morten, JJJ etc, who keep banging away at this “Its just a new block” message.

    Its as if they had a meeting a while back and decided “the truth” was too dangerous to talk about, because we all might panic and jump ship.

    The reality is, their lack of candour or lack of comprehension (don’t know which), has for the very first time in eight years of building and fixing WordPress sites, made me (for one) go out and look for an alternative.

    I hope they take this message on-board and man up to it, tool up for it, and treat us all to a little more of what we’ve come to expect from them. Not this shambolic stumble into the future, which Gutenberg is becoming.

    Thanks, once again, for being the voice of reason.

    Terence.

    —————-

    And then what d’ya know, the latest v2.0 Gutenberg pops up with a changelog as long as your arm.

    Well done guys and gals. Impressive!

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  11. Great compilation of resources. I am finally finding time to pull my sites into staging and checking them with Gutenberg to get ready for the switch.

    I did want to mention one more resource. Matt Mullenweg just did a Q&A at our meetup where Gutenberg quickly became the start of the conversation. Some interesting things were brought up and our WordCamp lead organizer wrote a recap of what he said.

    Matt Mullenweg’s QA About Gutenberg at WordPress Orlando

    He did say that they believe the switch will work for 99% of websites and only about 1% may have issues, but, as agencies, we need to convince clients that paying to transition their sites will be “#WorthIt” (a campaign idea they will be running). Was very interesting.

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  12. Why isn’t all of this – and more, especially official documentation – clearly available at WordPress.org? There should be an entire site, official, devoted to purely Gutenberg. As large and complex as this change is, the lack of outreach and clear documentation is frightening.

    For example, there are different meeting groups on Slack every week – design, data, etc – where are the notes from those discussions captured? Where are the options for debate posted and discussed? What decisions were made at each of these and where are those decisions posted? Who made those decisions? Where can one go for further discussion or details?

    Gutenberg information is spread out across slack, personal blogs, podcast interviews, youtube videos, github issues, and more – there is no centralization. And, even the kind of core page, the Gutenberg Handbook, is practically hidden, with no clear links to it anywhere (you have to hunt to find the link yourself – its here, BTW: https://wordpress.org/gutenberg/handbook/)

    Tom Nowell made Frontenberg so people can check out the latest Gutenberg editor without downloading the plugin – why is there no link to that in the Gutenberg Handbook? Why is that not being paired with user testing and feedback? Currently there are only 83 user tests (conducted at last WordCamp), why aren’t we leveraging things like Frontenberg to get hundreds, or thousands more? Why is the discussion about awareness of Gutenberg focused on promoting the plugin (that clearly states its not ready for live sites) instead of directing users to Frontenberg so they can at least see the interface?

    WordPress is based on the creation and publication information. It is the core system for websites, blogs, and forums (bbPress), yet practically none of these tools have been utilized to put together an organized, central, and official source of Gutenberg information. It’s all just Slack and Github.

    There needs to be a central site with a full time team of people dedicated to helping the larger WordPress community understand and prepare for Gutenberg – FAQs, meeting notes, agendas, roadmaps (actual and up to date), organization chart, code criteria, tutorials, workshops — the works. There should be a continuous and open discussion between the Core team and, literally, the world. Because the entire world is affected by this.

    WordPress powers 25+ % of the entire internet. That is millions of websites, billions of web pages, and tens of billions of dollars of revenue. Sites ranging from the New York Times to small businesses, to personal blogs are affected. From many of the discussions on GitHub, there are a lot of people with a lot of concerns about many aspects of Gutenberg, ranging from obscurities in the database structure to just wanting a clear definition of a “block.”

    There should be a huge Gutenberg portal packed with information with a full time staff supporting it, not an article on WP Tavern with a few links and an obscure “Handbook” that you have to hunt to find.

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    • Its as if they imagine there’s a WordPress tacit non-aggression pact in place, and we’re all captive now. The whole ecosystem will just say ~ “Gutenwhat? OK, whatever. You lead. We follow”.

      Sorry guys, but this is the same problem we see with just about anything WordPress devs lay their hands on; its all developer, not market lead. Just look at what’s happened to Jetpack recently.

      This is a major weakness of Automattic, and WordPress in general. In fact, its lack of marketing ability is probably the thing most likely to kill it.

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