Whenever I ask my readers what type of articles they want me to write, the focus is always on topics that help them right now.

And that’s understandable, because we are all busy with client work. And every tip that helps us speed up the delivery process is welcome.

But there is definitely a need to take a step back from the day to day. To reflect on the past, and plan for the future. And take a look at the bigger picture.

And that’s what I want to do in this three article series. I want to look at how the Gutenberg project is changing WordPress.

We’ll touch on:

1. Why WordPress launched the Gutenberg project.
2. How Gutenberg has changed and is changing WordPress.
3. What does this mean for us as people building websites for others?

So let’s get started with The Why behind Gutenberg.

What is Gutenberg?

First introduced in 2017, the Gutenberg project is a complete re-imagining of four critical parts of WordPress.

The official names for these phases are:

1. Content
2. Customization
3. Collaboration
4. Multilingual

But in reality, this means:

1. Improve the post content creation and editing experience.
2. Expanding the ways for users to modify the appearance and functionality of their sites.
3. Streamline the experience of managing all the content of a website.
4. Extend the translation capabilities to all types of content.

Over the years, people have used the term Gutenberg for specific features. Like the block-based content editor or now the site editor.

But this confusion doesn’t help us understand that Gutenberg is an entire project. A project that does not improve individual features but instead completely changes WordPress’s foundations.

With such a big and ambitious project goal, this raises the question of why we even need this.

Why do we need Gutenberg?

WordPress is free, meaning it is open-source and available at no cost. But so are other content management systems.

There are three main reasons for why WordPress is such an attractive choice:

1. A community of active developers maintains and improves the software.
2. A large ecosystem of free and paid plugins and themes.
3. Extendable to the point you can build anything with it.

But around the year 2015, those strong points weren’t as much of a selling point as they were before:

1. WordPress Core was stagnating because there weren’t the resources available to tackle big projects—both in terms of people hours and skills. Even essential projects like modernizing PHP were not getting done. Not to mention aligning the user experience with contemporary standards.
2. The biggest winners of the extension ecosystem were pagebuilders. The sheer number of available options and their install number were quite mind-boggling.
3. WordPress rested on its laurels for too long by offering nothing out of the box. While it led to many different use cases, they all fought over the same user base.

Unlike the impression in certain parts of the community that everything was fine, it wasn’t.

Sure, market share kept growing. But looking underneath all that, it was clear that it wasn’t growing because of WordPress.

Instead, the page builders and their army of affiliates, with Elementor being the biggest, were powering the growth.

These are as much a competitor to WordPress as are hosted platforms like Wix, Squarespace, and others.

None of these tools, hosted or plugin, look like Core WordPress. They also don’t work like Core WordPress.

And that’s because most users want something that looks and works like something other than out-of-the-box WordPress.

So, it was clear to Matt that something needed to change.

How does Gutenberg want to solve these issues?

Rather than only focus on end users, the Gutenberg project targets all audiences:

• Developers and agencies
• Plugin developers
• Theme developers
• Core developers
• Web hosts
• End users

These are very different audiences, but Gutenberg tries to address their needs through the following key pieces:

1. Integrate all the necessary tools to manage the entire website visually into Core .
2. Modernize the interface by adopting modern user experience improvements and creating a visual language for the entire WordPress Admin.
3. Offer flexible and powerful ways for developers to extend this tool.
4. Create a set of shared protocols between all software running on a website, from Core to plugins and themes.

What has Gutenberg done so far?

At this time, we’re several years into the Gutenberg project. Now that we have a good grasp of the project’s goals, we can look at changes already in WordPress and what changes are yet to come.