What is Gutenberg? I feel like there’s an identity crisis and I want to share my understanding of Gutenberg’s goals and hopefully, this will help clear some misunderstandings. I understand that we, developers, understand the objective behind Gutenberg but from my interaction with some people I have noticed that there is still some confusion…

While the Core team of WordPress set the right expectations during the early stages of Gutenberg, it seems like there is still a lot of confusion.

Since the initial release and implementation of Gutenberg in WordPress, it looked like an improved content editor for WordPress, a replacement for TinyMCE. It was even pushed that way by the core team. An improved editor to be able to have finer control over the content for posts & pages. While that is true, this was and is quickly followed up by the intention of introducing a full-site editor, essentially, building a page-builder.

If Gutenberg was just a better content editor and was never intended to be a page-builder or website-builder, there would be no intention of building a full-site editor within Gutenberg.

Now I know that there is a negative association with page-builder within the WordPress community but ultimately the goal for Gutenberg is to become a website builder. Page-building blocks will then be offered by 3rd party plugins.

Gutenberg fixes most of the problems due to which page-builders were shunned in the past especially the concern of content lock-in by the plugins and themes.

While I understand that the Core team is hugely motivated by Automattic’s agenda (they’re a huge part of the core team and extremely intelligent people), I believe that this is a step in the right direction.

My only wish is that we truly understand and accept that the Gutenberg’s ultimate goal is to be full-fledged website building experience, from editing the content for posts and pages to building page layouts using the same blocks.