It’s been almost a year and a half since the new WordPress editor “Gutenberg” was released officially as the default WordPress editor. However, before this release, we had the option to install Gutenberg as a plugin so we could test it and start getting familiar with it.

As any new major release, it introduced some challenges to WordPress editors and developers (mainly developers), besides some bugs and usability issues.

Unfortunately, it was not well received by some developers (myself included) who preferred to continue working with the Classic Editor, so a new plugin started catching on: The Classic Editor plugin, which at the time of writing this post, has more than 5 million of active installations. Fair enough for all those websites which were already using the good old Classic Editor. The Classic Editor plugin became a lifesaver for those websites.

By the way, this plugin is an official WordPress plugin, so it was released by the WordPress team precisely to avoid breaking those websites’ content with the new Gutenberg functionalities. They also announced:

This plugin will be fully supported and maintained until at least 2022, or as long as is necessary.

Once again, fair enough for all those sites using the Classic Editor, but what will happen after that date? What if the plugin developers decide to stop offering support to this plugin? Well, then it will be time to move away from the “good old times” and welcome the present.

Going back to “the rejection stage”, and talking about myself, I didn’t want to switch immediately to Gutenberg as soon as it was released, not for being afraid of change (well, actually I was afraid of that huge change)… anyway, I was aware there were many latent bugs and compatibility issues at the time it was released. In my opinion, the release of Gutenberg was too premature, I would have wait a bit for it to be more mature, more robust, and with fewer bugs.

Some of the most notorious issues when it was released were its lack of accessibility support, performance issues, some editor UX issues, lack of support on other plugins (like WooCommerce), etc.

In fact, Matt Mullenweg (who was leading the release process), in his presentation during the WordCamp US right after the launch of Gutenberg, did acknowledge that mistakes were made during the launch, and that he had learned the lesson so that these mistakes will hopefully not be repeated.

I heard (and read) many people saying that Gutenberg was a bad move and that it should never have been integrated to WordPress core as its default editor. But I think some of these feelings were also encouraged by personal reasons: fear of change, having to change the way to build custom themes, what would happen to the custom fields, the need to learn ReactJS to be able to build custom blocks, some people (like me) had already a defined workflow to build entire sites with Advanced Custom Fields and to offer a great edition experience with reusable fields, repeater fields, flexible content fields, etc. “Now, with Guteneberg, we’ll have to change everything we’ve built during these last years”, we said.

I know many people was really excited about Gutenberg, I actually was, but at the same time I felt worried about starting using it on my new projects, and more than excitement, the Gutenberg release caused anxiety and uncertainty to some (or most) of us. Instead of an improvement, I felt it would introduce a risk to my new projects, I really felt it like an Alpha release instead of a Production release.

And there are tons of additional reasons why many people felt this way and this is why I called this first chapter “Rejection”.

But what’s next? Sometimes after a rejection comes a less rejective or acceptance stage, but, do you think this was the case of my experience with Gutenberg? Judging by the title of this post, we could say yes, however accepting something not always means embracing it or adapting to it. If you want to know what happened after this rejection stage, and if I embraced it or just kept doing my job with my good old structured way to build websites, then be in the loop and wait for my next article: Chapter 2!