TLDR: Gutenberg was added to the core to make WordPress.com more competitive against hosted platforms like Wix and bring Automattic more money.
Full Version: Since 2018, I have been bothered by one question: Why did Matt decide to include Gutenberg in the WordPress core?
Back in the day, it was apparent to me that this step was aimed at competing with Wix and other hosted platforms. But it led to another question: when WordPress controls over 40% of the market, there's no sense in mimicking competitors. Furthermore, WordPress already has many good page builders.
Why do you need to create another one that still lacks many essential features?
And a few days ago, I found an answer.
Gutenberg was merged into the WordPress core to benefit the commercial project WordPress.com and make it more competitive against Wix and other hosted platforms.
Please do not confuse WordPress as a platform with the commercial hosting WordPress.com. It's a crucial element here.
Creating a new page builder requires a lot of resources, so Automattic decided to involve the community and other companies in the development. There was no option to use an existing page builder because Automattic had to share some revenue with its developers and did not have full control over it.
Other companies, such as hosting providers, plug-in developers, etc., do not benefit from that so much because they do not sell the WordPress platform as a service like Automattic does. The only thing they care is to have more clients and installs.
Since Automattic fully controls development, most of the resources spent during the last six years were aimed at the new block editor. You can do an experiment, open release notes for a couple of the WordPress versions, and try to find changes that are not related to Gutenberg.
Having the block editor is not necessarily a bad thing; some people like it. However, many agencies and developers focused on custom development find it too limited and restrictive.
What is more confusing is that many companies and regular people contributing to WordPress are working on features needed for Automattic in the first place instead of solving real problems WordPress has:
- Poor multi-language support out of the box;
- Obsolete media gallery and the related API;
- API to manage admin notifications;
- Missing API to create option pages;
- Improvements to the thumbnail management;
- Better API to manage custom fields;
- Improvements to the admin screens, adding new filters and hooks.
We definitely have some issues with WordPress leadership, and I hope we will find a solution.
Either things evolve or they are stagnant. You cannot know what would happen if WordPress did not invest in Guttenberg. Its possible that WP wouldnt be as competitive.
Automattic making money is normal business, they arent a NPO.
If you are unsatisfied with WordPress, you can start a fork, start a competitor software, contribute to the project in different ways.
Yes, there things the Founder is doing right now that are stupid, this I agree, but trying to point finger to Automattic for wanting to make money is just dumb.
Whats your contribution to WordPress compared to Automattic’s?
Couldn’t they have included Gutenberg in the core for the WordPress.com version and gone a different direction with WordPress.org? Do the have to be the same?
i didn’t like Gutenberg when it was released. i went out of my way to avoid using it until about 2 years ago. i still think it has a lot of gaps, especially at the enterprise level. but users fucking love it. and that’s who i build for.
there were numerous page builder plugins before Gutenberg. users loved them, but all that did was create various levels of lock-in due to how they were implemented (shortcodes vs actual markup, etc) and made it harder to change without a lot of extra work. so people walked away with a negative view of WP when it was a layer outside of core. with Gutenberg, there’s a native builder-style editor that can be extended. that’s better, regardless of who’s making money off it.