Last week was all about the new Gutenberg Editor and its update to version 0.2.0. We explore the question of whether the editor is even usable in the beta version. And Matt Mullenweg provides a look behind the scenes of the core team in an interview and talks about the future of WordPress.
"Gutenberg is currently not usable"
Gutenberg is being praised as groundbreaking for the future of WordPress. And rightly so: the new block system is impressive and gives hope for a future without page builders and widgets. Unfortunately, however, the current beta version of Gutenberg is not yet really usable. In principle, that's not a bad thing - after all, beta phases are designed to eliminate bugs and improve software. If it weren't for the magic limit of 100,000 active installations set by Matt Mullenweg. Gutenberg is still a long way away from that.
Gutenberg 0.2.0 and WordPress 4.9
Update 0.2.0 of the Gutenberg beta version was released last week. Looking at the development of active installations of the plugin (currently 700+), there are doubts as to whether Matt Mullenweg's 100,000 target will be reached in the expected one to two months. Before the Gutenberg Editor can actually be integrated into the core, there will most likely first be a 4.9 release that focuses on theme and plugin management and paves the way for Gutenberg. The first ideas for the 4.9 update have already been discussed in the Dev Chat. WordPress 4.8.1 is expected to be released in the last week of July and will only include minor fixes.
Matt's look behind the scenes
In a 30-minute interview with apply_filters, Matt Mullenweg, WordPress co-founder and CEO of Automattic, talks about his role as WordPress Development Lead and reviews the history of WordPress. Mullenweg also talks about his priorities for 2017, including the planned integration of the new Gutenberg Editor into the core and progress with the REST API. Mullenweg also openly addresses the recurring problem of the slow implementation of long-standing proposals and visions for WordPress. In this context, he addresses the downsides of community-based open source WordPress projects.
For example, he describes the WordPress releases of recent years as "uninspiring". According to Mullenweg, one of the reasons for the relatively slow development of WordPress is the prevailing decision-making inertia. This is mainly due to the consensus culture of the WordPress community: "At certain points it might be effective to appoint a decision maker and just disagree and commit, or agree and commit, to the decisions that are made because, in many cases, I think any decision will be better than no decision, which is what many things in WordPress have had sometimes for as long as seven or ten years."
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