[xzel]

Disclaimer: I'm a Wordpress plugin developer and my opinions are my own.

This is a really weird offering from Automattic and IMO the price is pretty insane. I would love for Automattic to actually focus on Gutenberg/Wordpress and get it in a decent state for development. They're at major version 16 and continue to push breaking changes to peoples page layouts. They've made countless decisions that just plan don't make sense. Until the past year I'd consider Gutenberg an abject failure; now, it is at least usable. There's a good reason its had a 1 star rating on the Plugin marketplace until a few months ago. It still doesn't have 5% of the feature set of something like Divi, Elementor, Avada, Salient or any of the other big names in WP themes/website builders. Elementor is so massive people sell themes built for it! I think it is incredible what Matt has accomplished with WP and his vision is admirable but I think its time for him to step aside and let Automattic find someone else to lead and refocus on their core product.

[avg_dev]

Hi, can you perhaps explain what Gutenberg, Divi, Elementor, Aveda, and Salient do?

Just a curious party without much knowledge. I hosted WP on a VPS maybe a decade ago. I wasn’t very skilled with it but my friends needed a site. I forgot about it for a while and I guess it wasn’t at the time evergreen/self-updating and eventually it was used to send a lot of spam emails somehow. That’s about the extent of my knowledge of WP. I tried building a simple static site generator once on that same VPS where you could have HTML page headers and footers and page content templates, and it worked fine for me, but I tried to get a non-tech user to use it and they could not, and were ecstatic after I finally suggested that they try WP.com - they loved it.

[xzel]

Gutenberg is attempting to be a Frontend / UI style site editor (example here: https://wordpress.org/gutenberg ). An amazing example of this type of editor is Webflow. Lesser examples include Square Space and Wix. What these other plugins, Divi/Elem/Avada/Salient, do is provide professional templates that allow users to build from along with a visual editor. These push WP output, that is what is rendered in your browser, from simple blog to an actual website experience. They also all provide something similar to what Gutenberg does but they built it 10 years ago on the original WP PHP backend (Gutenberg is all React). WP pushing to Gutenberg has actually kind of screwed them a bit, but I digress. You can think of them, and Webflow imo, kinda like photoshop for websites, or maybe Figma for web development. They allow designers to learn a tool instead of CSS / JS. What I think the WP theme builders really excel at is getting something that looks modern and fast really really quickly. I'm happy to talk about the market and who buys licenses for the WP theme builders but this post would be a book! haha.

Vanilla WP is excellent for beginners who aren't trying to do anything fancy, in fact I think its one of the best things to ever happen to the web. Yes there are exploits etc but that comes with all software. But most other software doesn't run something like 30-40% of the web though so their bugs are really magnified. Same goes for the WP plugin theme builders I mentioned above.