{"id":211,"date":"2018-10-15T13:59:32","date_gmt":"2018-10-15T12:59:32","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/zedejose.com\/?p=211"},"modified":"2018-10-15T14:55:44","modified_gmt":"2018-10-15T13:55:44","slug":"acf-5-8-a-flood-in-a-gutenberg-desert","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/zedejose.com\/acf-5-8-a-flood-in-a-gutenberg-desert\/","title":{"rendered":"ACF 5.8, a Flood in a Gutenberg Desert"},"content":{"rendered":"

Managing the content body of a website using blocks is generally a good idea, but from the point of view of someone developing larger, very customized projects, where sometimes the administration interface is significantly more complex than the front-end, Gutenberg, for me, is a stunningly bad implementation of that good idea1<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n

The Desert<\/h2>\n

The discussion has been raging on for a while, and the point of this post isn’t to add to it; I have bigger fish to fry. If you’re interested, I encourage you to read Peter Knight’s comment on WP Tavern<\/a>, which eloquently distillates my own thoughts on the whole debacle, much better than I ever could.<\/p>\n

My concern is rather that I have a few very large projects on my hands, and the prospect of simply upgrading WordPress to 5.0, is definitely not the same afterthought it was when upgrading to any other version until now. Leaving the vague and floating timeline aside<\/a>2<\/a><\/sup>, from the testing I have done, both by myself and with some clients, it will cause significant, and unexpected<\/span>,\u00a0 turbulence on both the projects’ timeline, as well as budget, and defending those changes to a client makes me sound, to them, like Gutenberg was my idea3<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n

To be clear: none of them think this is a bad idea, per se<\/em>, conceptually, but every single one of them hates the implementation. Some because it’s confusing (agreed, those are easy to retrain, with patience), others (more technically inclined) because they’re horrified at how this will impact the development teams’ workflow (oh look, we need React developers now), some because it isn’t accessible<\/a> (goodbye government work for me), and even a few because they can’t see the point of turning their installation into Squarespace or Wix, but with less functionality. To those concerns, I would add my own, of lesser concern to them: the politics of it all is horrid, and is fracturing a community on whose shoulders WordPress’ success was built.<\/p>\n

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people are in dissonance over WP decisions (ship Gutenberg at all costs) not following WP values (design for everyone, emphasize accessibility).<\/p>\n

we assume decisions stand on values. and they just don\u2019t in WP. values are used to decorate decisions after the fact, not shape them.<\/p>\n

— Andrey Savchenko (@Rarst) October 12, 2018<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n