The Gutenberg Times will be hosting representatives from the Pew Research Center in its Live Q&A session on July 22, 2022, with co-hosts Birgit Pauli-Haack and Anne McCarthy. After an eight-month hiatus, the show will return with guests who are doing some exciting things with Gutenberg out in the wild.
The Pew Research Center is a non-profit organization that conducts public opinion polling, demographic research, content analysis, and other data-driven social science research. Producers and designers publish polls, charts, and findings through the organization’s website. Its unique use of custom and core blocks empowers them to create and publish interactive formats with minimal involvement from developers.
Michael Piccorossi, Director of Digital Strategy at the Pew Research Center, will be a featured guest along with his colleague Seth Rubenstein, who leads development.
In May, Rubenstein tweeted a thread demonstrating how the Pew Research Center is using Gutenberg. The homepage, which has a magazine style layout, along with the topic pages, were all built with the block editor. He also gave a quick editor demo of an updated block version of the organization’s Political Typology Quiz, which Rubenstein said is their most complex digital product.
“Before, if a producer wanted to make a design change on a quiz well that required a dev’s time,” Rubenstein said. “Now they can make all those choices (with input from the design team) themselves. This frees us up to build even more and gives us more time to maintain/improve functionality.”
The Pew Research Center’s development team does not plan to open source all of its block library but will be open sourcing their new Gutenberg-powered chart builder plugin (demonstrated below).
“For all its naysayers Gutenberg is a game changer for digital news apps,” Rubenstein said. “It’s a force multiplier for your team. We’ve spent the last three years going ‘all in’ on block development.
“This may seem like overkill, but it forced us into a block first approach that means by end of this fall we’ll be ready to go all in on full site editing, which just means we can do more with fewer people and more consistently and better than before.”
The Gutenberg Times Q&A session will cover how the Pew Reach Center streamlines its publishing process through a mix of core and custom blocks, and how they create powerful charts and quizzes. It will be hosted on Zoom at 11:00 AM in Eastern Time (US and Canada) and is free to attend with registration. Attendees will have the opportunity to ask their own questions after the guests demo some of their workflows and blocks in the backend.
It was a fabulous event. I learned so much. Very inspiring. If you missed it, the recording is now online on YouTube
See description for shared links, mentioned in the conversation. Seth Rubenstein also prepared an example code repo.
Huge Thank You to Sarah Gooding for covering the announcement on the WPTavern.