In reply to Noah Mason.

Be careful about saying “never” when it comes to software development. We also build enterprise sites, and we decided to give Gutenberg a try a couple years ago.

I completely get the idea that you don’t want content authors screwing around with all the various design options that Gutenberg blocks provide. That’s why we disable all the blocks we don’t want authors using. We even built a plugin that allows us to toggle blocks on and off. Sometimes, we create our own, more limited blocks, or in some cases, the default blocks provide a few options we don’t like, such as the paragraph block allowing you to set text and background color. However, those options can be easily disabled. It may seem like a lot of work setting up Gutenberg in this way, but once you’ve done it once, you have a framework on which to build all your future sites.

So, you may be wondering, “if I’m just going to disable most of Gutenberg (and maybe rely on just the classic editor block), why should I waste time configuring it?” And the answer is that Gutenberg provides a lot of useful features beyond just giving a ton of design control to authors.

We still make use of custom post types, taxonomies, and meta boxes where appropriate, but we also create blocks when they are a better fit for the content. For example, without Gutenberg blocks, a simple image carousel usually requires a separate plugin, and it has its own UI and pages for managing it. Then, the authors have to remember shortcodes to inject the carousels into the editor. It’s a much better user experience to add a carousel block to the page, edit it in place, and see live feedback on the changes.

Block patterns are also incredible! Instead of creating multiple templates and post types and forcing authors to choose them before building the page, you can create common patterns for your authors to change on the fly. Columns with cards, a gallery of logo images, whatever design layouts you create, you can make them into patterns for authors to quickly drop onto a page. And, as I said before, how much design control you give is entirely up to you.

I’m starting to sound like a Gutenberg shill, so I’ll stop here. I just wanted to say that we were in a similar position when it came to adopting Gutenberg and worrying over the amount of design control we would lose. Having a couple years experience with Gutenberg now, I can honestly say we’d be doing our customers a disservice forcing them to use the classic editor.