Morten Rand-Hendriksen on What Gutenberg Means For the Future of WordPress

As work continues on Gutenberg, members of the community are discussing its impacts on WordPress’ future. Morten Rand-Hendriksen considers Gutenberg to be a watershed moment, “This is a revolution,” he said.

“This is a watershed moment for WordPress. This is entirely new and fundamentally different from how WordPress works and how we work with it today. I cannot overstate it enough when I say this changes everything.”

Rand-Hendriksen suggests that Gutenberg will allow WordPress to graduate from being a blogging platform to a platform for managing views. If Gutenberg adds complexity to the user interface, he predicts many users will migrate to simpler, hosted publishing systems.

He also predicts that due to the REST API and Gutenberg, permanent fractures may develop between different segments of the community and user base.

It’s exciting to think about what could happen to WordPress and the web in general if Rand-Hendriksen’s optimism comes to fruition. “Whatever happens to WordPress’ user base, once Gutenberg is implemented fully, WordPress’ role in the wider web and internet community will change,” he said.

“If all these things actually work, and people find them useful, WordPress will herald in a new age of UI and UX exploration. Applications have followed WordPress’ lead before and will do it again if the new solution works.”

As for the future of WordPress, Rand-Hendriksen says:

With the REST API in core and Gutenberg on the horizon, I am starting to see a new future for WordPress, one that looks nothing like where we are today. But this is true for the web as a whole as well.

Non-pointer interactions, AR/VR/MR, AI, content beyond the screen, all these things are already within sight and the web as we know it is on the cusp of its own wave of revolutionary changes.

The question I’m left to ponder is whether Gutenberg is what brings WordPress into that future.

I encourage you to read the entire post as it provides a lot of food for thought. What do you think about his predictions and the impacts Gutenberg might have on the web as a whole?