I am also looking forward to test ClassicPress, but, for now WP with Classic Editor plugin is the best way to get rid of Gutenberg and still get normal WP. I don’t expect ClassicPress fork to get stable release for at least 6 more months.

Thanx for enlightening me! That helps to understanding the inherent obstacles in the whole project.

First thing is metabox styling, that has 100% different with Gutenberg, so plugins with metaboxes relying on the previous metabox styling will look bad. That is easier to fix with additional styling. But, metaboxes that rely on interaction with the editor, other elements on the edit page (other metaboxes) will be completely broken, and what is worst, in some cases unfixable, because we no longer have one editor, each block, in essence, is an editor. Plugins that add items to the TinyMCE editor toolbar will need 100% rewrite to support toolbars in each editor block (or some of them).

The worst thing here is that Gutenberg is very badly documented, similar to all other JavaScript libraries in WordPress, and quality examples, understandable examples are very scarce, and mostly written by regular users, official documentation right now is next to useless.

I really feel your pain, MillaN. :-/ Will the Gutenberg API be the way to integrate these things. At the risk of exposing my huge ignorance on the matter of core coding, could you perhaps elaborate a little on the hurdles of closing the plugin coding gap between Gutenberg and the classic WordPress environment? If not, I understand.

I think that would be possible, limit the available blocks to specific post type, or make it easy to disable blocks using filters. That would make sense with bbPress. But, Gutenberg should be able to work in the limited space, not only full screen, I would like to see how that turns out.

Sounds right. I’m concerned about a forum that has a lot of photo sharing, and I could envision much simpler interface if we at some point allowed a matured Gutenberg with a reduced number of blocktypes. We might not have to do BBCodes then. 🙂

Right now, I don’t think that there will be any development for bbPress to add Gutenberg support. bbPress development is slow, and upcoming 2.6 version is few months late already, and supporting Gutenberg would require a lot of changes, that might be considered for 2.7 (or more realistically, 2.8) version. But, it is possible that someone will make a plugin for bbPress to integrate Gutenberg.

For the most part, forums don’t need complex editing, and I know that most forum users are not using even TinyMCE editor, so I don’t think that most websites will embrace Gutenberg in the forums on the front end.

Thanks for the comment Jesper!

I am currently testing and updating my plugins that have metaboxes, and with the latest Gutenberg 2.4, mostly there are styling issues with metaboxes, and they work fine. There are breaking things in metaboxes that will affect plugins that need to work with the edit screen and editor area, and I don’t see a solution for such plugin, other than radical code changes to support Gutenberg. At least, for now, major WordPress plugins will be updated for the Gutenberg in time, but I still think that a huge number of plugins will not be, and that will cause websites to break.

I will publish follow up article later this month, including my experience with updating plugins to work with Gutenberg.

Thanks for the comment Erich! Gutenberg has come a long way since the version I reviewed in this article, and I plan to revisit the Gutenberg soon. Many things are still a problem, but a lot of other things are much better now. I am trying each version as it is released, testing with mine plugins, and it is getting better. I will wait for 2.1 version to do a new review.

Thanks for your in depth article about this. Since Gutenberg was announced I migrated my website away from WordPress and to IPS. I hate that I had to do this and maybe it was a knee-jerk reaction to the announcement. Still, I miss my WordPress and the community that supports it. I’m not against change and I fully support change that will foster improved WordPress performance overall. I had hoped that this would drive WordPress towards PHP7 with all of the performance improvements I expect. From reading your article, it seems like it is being forced as a way to end commercial plugins such as Visual Composer and even yourself. I hope that the final product will be great and will help grow development of great plugins like bbpress Toolbox, but I fear it’s going to cause so many problems when they make the final push to core.