In reply to Darren Ethier.

Thanks for the candid response Darren, it really is appreciated. However, To be honest you’ve only managed to significantly deepen my concerns on the direction of Gutenberg and by extension WooCommerce.

For context I run a small agency, we specialise in dealing with small to medium, with the a couple of large [one over 100m turnover] businesses. The vast majority of our customers consist of around 5 - 10 people and another significant portion are single person enterprises. In total there are around 150 sites we host, manage and maintain to varying degrees.

What I’m trying to convey is that we run a serious customer focused operation. We use the Wordpress platform and premium products from the surrounding ecosystem everyday, in a real world environment for multiple businesses responding to their needs and requests and have been quite the champions for Wordpress. That being said, the lack of consistency, clarity and detailed roadmap in the Gutenberg project is not helpful to us as a business or our customers, in fact it’s detrimental and is making us actually question the viability of continuing with Wordpress as our go to platform - we are not alone with this viewpoint.

I’m under no illusion with regards to the potential benefits Gutenberg could bring but at the moment it’s no where near to delivering on it yet. We actually use Gutenberg on several live customers sites, in some ways it works well - usually the site we mange need to end - in others is been such a disaster that we had to roll back and restore the original approach. In all cases it’s offered no advantage over a traditional page builder other than a little less bloat. As far as we’re concerned as a business beta software has been dropped into core, essential functions are being removed without replacements even being scoped yet and it feels like we’re in the middle of some grand experiment.

To quickly address a few points directly:

We’re reluctant to just add filters and actions everywhere because we’re not sure yet that will be the best way to make blocks extensible and resilient.

Quite frankly I find this astonishing. So you are seriously telling me Gutenberg is considered suitable for primetime without a standard method as to how blocks can be extended [up to now I thought I'd be missing something].

Storefront is currently in maintenance mode

This is news. We’ve invested some significant time into our own storefront based child theme however if it’s now in maintenance mode there’s a worry it’s going to get dropped/superceeded. Is that the case?

I think the important thing to keep in mind with all these changes is that nothing is going to be ideal overnight (an impossible task).

I agree completely and understand first hand that development takes time, lots of it, and transitions are really, really tough. Performing a significant upgrade or moving a client too a new CMS can be huge ordeal. However this it why we have staging site and in custom dev branches and beta versions.

In our, and lots of other devs opinions it would seem, Gutenberg is beta software and should not be in core. WooCommerce blocks should be marked as beta software without question until it reaches feature parity at a minimum.

On a wider point what seems to be a fundamental misunderstanding by the Gutenberg team is that most businesses don't want to be ‘empowered’ to customise their stores. Retailers for example just want to sell and market stuff, when people open a brick and mortar store they get shop fitters in to fit out, designers to design stuff, buy a checkout from a checkout supplier and book keepers to do the books - they are the experts. Sure mom and pop places often do lots themselves but as soon as someone gets serious they hire professionals, be that external or internal. The same for online stores and sites. Enthusiastic amateurs build what they can but ultimately they are not professional marketers, designers or developers.

In reality, almost without exception, every company or individual we deal with wants the bare minimum to do with their site beyond posting content, managing orders etc the day to day stuff. They sure as hell don’t want to build it themselves. Our first job for most smaller clients is usually migrating and replacing the disaster of a home made site they tried to build on Wix, Squarespace etc and even Wordpress with the usual bloated theme along with 90 plugins they don’t need. The common line we get is “I can never quite get it right”.

They want us to solve all those problems, take the photos, get the stock images, create a colour palette and for it to just work. Then someone to help them when they have an issue so they can just get on with earning a living. You don’t earn a living by trying to understand the nuances of the chameleon that is the Gutenberg interface or why that plugin that’s supposed to work doesn’t work [Unless you’re an agency like us that is].

This move fast break things approach is deeply worrying and I think damaging to the Wordpress project and ecosystem as a whole. It’s like you want to create a Webflow or Squarespace competitor and as a company if we wanted to use that, we’d be doing it already! It seems your focus is shifting too far toward individual consumers and you’re losing site of the needs of a large, possibly hidden, segment of your user base. We’re the guys that never install jetpack and don’t connect the store to woocommerce.

My contribution to what the ideal state could be is that we have long term visibility and stability first of all, people are listened too and Gutenberg is a fork or feature plugin that’s eventually merged when it’s truly ready.