What Needs To Be Done To Save The Gutenberg Project?
Save the Gutenberg Project. Discover essential actions needed to preserve this literary treasure and ensure free access to knowledge for all With our special guest, Kevin Geary.
Join us in our compelling exploration of what must be done to rescue the Gutenberg Project from its current challenges. This video outlines pressing issues such as budget constraints and digital adaptation while offering actionable insights on fostering growth within this landmark initiative. Together, we can advocate for open access to knowledge.
#1 – Kevin, is it possible to build a page and website builder that meets the diverse needs of a core project that drives 40% + of all websites on the internet?
#2 – Can you explain to the audience the critical concepts around “Intrinsic Design” and your personal views connected to it being implicated in Gutenberg?
#3 – Have you any thoughts on why it seems so hard for the leadership team to admit and deal with some of the major problems of the Gutenberg project?
#4 – What are the two to three key things that need to be changed connected to the Gutenberg project as quickly as possible?
#5—How do you see AI changing online business, including your own, in the next 18 months?
#6—If you had your time machine (H. G. Wells) and could travel back to the beginning of you?
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The Show’s Main Transcript
[00:00:00.990] – Jonathan Denwood
Welcome back, folks, to the WP-Tonic Show this week in WordPress and Cess. In this week’s show, we got a returning guest. We got Kevin Gehry from Digital Gravy, a famous trainer, influencer, web designer, entrepreneur, and outspoken critic of Gutenberg and where it’s going. I think he would be okay with that part as well. We will discuss a bit of an explosion or frustration that occurred when the latest update 6.6 hits. Some of the biggest influencers in the WordPress space seemed to just had enough, and they were pretty outspoken, even more than me, and even in some ways more outspoken than Kevin. It was a subject that I got a bit bored with because I couldn’t see, but I think it’s something that because of this outpouring of resentment Well, toward Gutenberg from other sources, I thought it was best to get a true expert back on the show and have a discussion.
[00:01:40.170] – Jonathan Denwood
Kevin, would you like to give the tribe a quick intro about you and what you do?
[00:01:47.250] – Kevin Geary
Sure. I am a software developer and I have a team. We develop Automatic CSS, a CSS framework and workflow tool for WordPress page builders. Specifically, WordPress page builders, I should say. We also have a Frames add-on, which is a rapid-fire layout system. No design opinions just get you to the wireframing phase as quickly as possible, and then you get to do the fun part of web design, making it pretty from there. But everything is responsive and flexible and built with automatic CSS, and so it does 60 to 70% of the work for you. I’m also an educator. I have a YouTube channel, and I try to teach what we would refer to as best practices in modern web design using WordPress and page builders.
[00:02:39.070] – Jonathan Denwood
That’s great. I’ve got my great co-host, Kurt. Kurt, would you like to introduce yourself to the new listeners and viewers?
[00:02:46.380] – Kurt von Ahnen
Yeah, Kurt von Ahnen. We have a small agency called Manana Nomas. We focus primarily on membership and learning websites and work directly with WP-Tonic and the good folks at Lifter LMS.
[00:02:58.190] – Jonathan Denwood
In this interview, We’re going to be discussing, whether is it possible to build something that’s reasonably satisfactory to a very broad audience, almost 40% plus of websites run on WordPress. Is it possible to build something like Gutenberg that can satisfy the needs of such a diverse group of people? We will be discussing intrinsic design applied to Gutenberg and maybe some of the problems there and a lot more. But before we go into the meat and potatoes of this great discussion, I’ve got some messages from our major sponsors. We will be back in a few moments, folks. Three, two, one. We’re coming back, folks. I’d like to point out we’ve got some great special offers from the major sponsors, plus a curated list that’s aimed at the WordPress professional and power user. To get all these goodies, all you have to do is go over to Wp-tonic. Com/deals. Wp-tonic. Com/deals, and you’ll find all the goodies there, my beloved tribe, what more could you ask for? Probably a lot more, but that’s all you’ll get from that page. Sorry to disappoint. I’ve made a career of it. Get used to Kevin, like I said in the intro, and I think we’ve touched this particular point, but when you first came on the show, it’s driving 40% or more of the internet WordPress.
[00:04:49.910] – Jonathan Denwood
Gutenberg is really at the core of the future of WordPress. But in your mind, is it possible to build something that can meet the fundamental needs of such a diverse community, Kevin?
[00:05:05.120] – Kevin Geary
It really just depends on what that community needs to do with the tool. I think it’s possible. We can look at iOS on Apple devices, and obviously, everybody uses that, but it’s a specific limited range of things people are trying to do, typically. It’s a very opinionated environment. In web design, there are a lot of different kinds of sites people are trying to build with a lot of various requirements and a lot of varying skill levels. There are a lot of other decisions that need to be made about all of these things. And so the challenge is much more significant. I would never say that the best way to start with software development of any kind is to define a target market for everybody. Typically, when you’re creating software, you would define a specific target market, and you would build the software in that particular target market. I know we have talked about this in the past, but we’ll rehash it just a little bit. There are two environments that we’re really talking about here. We’re talking about a hosted environment, like a Wix Squarespace-type environment. Then we’re talking about a fully open source.
[00:06:19.360] – Kevin Geary
You own all your data, you install WordPress on a private server, WordPress. Org. This is already a technical environment to some degree, much more technical, right out of the gate than something like a Wix or Squarespace. And so it assumes that the user is a little bit more technical. So the idea that we would build the editing environment for the most basic of users, to me, is a mismatch right out of the gate because the most basic of users would not be installing WordPress on their server and doing the things that are required with WordPress—org with no onboarding of any kind to speak of. And the chaos The SaaS of just having the Wild Wild West of themes and plugins and all of this other stuff is already a mismatch. So the idea that we’re building for everyone software in a platform that already isn’t really for everybody, we need to How do you solve that first.
[00:07:16.900] – Jonathan Denwood
Yeah, I see your point. Because obviously, with the SaaS competition like Wix and Squarespace, and then you’ve had some more agency professional SaaS platforms on the market. But recently, got interesting move with Wix because Wix got their Wix Studio. They seem to be throwing some serious money at influencers and people on the Internet in general to promote it. They’ve offered me some serious money. I’m still thinking about it because I’m so easily bribeable, Kevin. What’s your views about what Wix is up to?
[00:08:06.220] – Kevin Geary
I haven’t used it personally in a very long time. I wrote them off a while back. I don’t tend to use software that lies to you in advertising. I feel like Wix… I call it the Wix lie. They’re the ones primarily running the commercials, promoting this idea that anybody can build a website. Anybody can create a You can create a website in five minutes. Haven’t you heard Jonathan with Wix? These are the ads. This is the narrative of the ads, right? So that’s a lie. It’s not true in the slightest. Even if you use their AI tool or There are pre-made layouts and pre-made design sets and all of this, you’re getting to a website that’s most likely not going to do anything for your business. Now, I use the joke of my mom all the time. If my mom comes to me and says, Kevin, I really need website for my Bunko Club, then of course, I’m going to send her to Wix. I choose a template. It doesn’t matter. It’s inconsequential. But if we’re talking about a business owner who has a real business, who really wants that business to grow, going to Wix and using their AI builder or their five-minute fill out this template thing, that’s not going to do them any good at the end of the day anyway.
[00:09:19.830] – Kevin Geary
So even if they do what the commercial says, which they can’t, and we know this, we know this because Wix users all the time come to agencies and say, I I tried to do it myself, and I wasted three to five days of my life, and now I want you to do it, right? That’s a huge source of where agencies get business. So it’s not true. It’s promoting a false narrative. And when you lie about your software, I tend to not want to use your software. I just don’t know a lot about the Wix platform in 2024.
[00:09:49.390] – Jonathan Denwood
Before I throw you over to Kirk, I got one follow-up question. I was just surprised that this outpouring that seemed to come out of nowhere from Paul of WP Tuts, a very fair individual, in my opinion, in some ways more fairer than me. I can be a bit abrasive or blunt when I want to be, which is quite often. Then we got Adam, and I’ve always got on Adam from WP Crafter. That’s probably one of the biggest still in WordPress. A very astute business mind, somebody that I get on with fine. Some people don’t, but I get on with him okay. But he doesn’t normally go into negativity, but his latest video, to say it was brutal about Gutenberg and about the basic situation would be the understatement of the century. It was really brutal stuff. Have you contemplated why? Because it seemed the Gutenberg propagandist and central controls seemed to be getting what they wanted. But then out of nowhere, you had this outpouring. I can’t work out where it came from suddenly, I don’t know where it came from either, other than we’ve been trending that direction.
[00:11:36.830] – Kevin Geary
I myself have been, like you said in your intro, an outspoken critic of Gutenberg for a while now and with good reason. I don’t know if people hear somebody say that and then, okay, I guess now I feel okay chiming in, too. I don’t really know what’s going on. I think it’s good, though. I think Gutenberg needs There’s more discussion about the faults with it. I actually think that Gutenberg is… Well, you mentioned the 6.6 update. I think that was the version number. I actually don’t pay all that much attention to it because I’m not affected by it because I don’t use it. But what I’m constantly told by the Gutenberg crowd and the block editor crowd and the close to core crowd, that’s why I always guess, you got to be close to core. Why do you have to be close to core? Well, they’re not going to break your sites. It’s close to core. Like a page builder, bricks could go haywire and your sites just break overnight. I’m like, okay, well, all right, that’s an argument. But then WordPress 6.6 happens or whatever. And I see people on Twitter, it broke my site.
[00:12:42.430] – Kevin Geary
And I just reply like, this I don’t think it’s possible because I’ve just been told endlessly that this doesn’t happen when you’re close to core. So something’s got to be wrong. Of course, I’m poking fun. But this is the thing. We have to get rid of these narratives that because it’s the block editor, nothing bad is ever going to happen. Because it’s the block editor, it’s naturally going to be successful. No, I see. My argument has been, because this is another thing people say, oh, if bricks could disappear overnight, well, so could the block editor. Let’s talk about that. So could the block editor. They could get to a point, because they’re struggling. We’re seven years in. It’s still a struggle. It’s a struggle to get people to adopt it. It’s a struggle to use it. They could get to a point where they say, Guys, this was the concept. We tried our best at it. We couldn’t get it adopted. We couldn’t get it over the hump. We couldn’t get it to the finish line where it needed to be. It has too much technical debt now, and it’s just too expensive for us to keep trying to push this thing on people.
[00:13:48.300] – Kevin Geary
We’re going to go back to being the best possible CMS. That might be a pivot they make. We don’t know. We don’t have a crystal ball. It’s possible, though. What I think we need to stop doing is putting out this narrative that because it’s native, it’s going to be successful. It’s going to be around forever, and everybody should use it regardless of all of the obvious problems that it has.
[00:14:11.090] – Jonathan Denwood
Yeah, I’m not. I I’m not quite as critical as you are, Kevin, of it, but I think there has to be an understanding of its flaws, and I actually think it’s flaws. But its flaws could be dealt with in a reasonable period of time, that less than a year, actually, I would want to get it sorted out in less than six months.
[00:14:43.420] – Kevin Geary
Do you think that’s technically possible?
[00:14:48.520] – Jonathan Denwood
I think you could make it a lot better. This is only my opinion, Kevin. There’s certain things that we’re not aware of that are driving, but they’ve a bad usability UX situation, and they’re just adding more functionality to a bad scenario, which is by doing that, makes the basic scenario even worse. Your criticism goes deeper around how the output and their decisions about using JSON and other things, and your criticisms are even deeper than mine. Mine’s a more UX usability criticism. I’m not saying that your criticisms shouldn’t be listened to, but you got to start somewhere. So, Kurt, over to you.
[00:15:49.930] – Kurt von Ahnen
I feel like I need to step back a few minutes because, Kevin, you’ve mentioned a couple of times use case, and I was trying to study for this interview, and I heard you say use case on WDD Live a couple of times. I think it’s super important, and it’s one of my catchphrases when I do the live stuff with Lifter. So use case to me is huge, and I think about my own journey, and it’s like I’m more of an implementer than a developer, so I’ll get something, load up WordPress, and now we’ve got one click installs from all these different hosts. So the tech load isn’t that heavy to say, okay, well, I want to do WordPress instead of Wix because they can click a button and they got it. But where I get the use case confusion, and bear with the length of the question, please, but I’ve done the classic editor, I’ve done the blocks thing. I’m growing with blocks with them, then full site editing rolls out and confuses the crud out of me for a month. I tried to get strong in Elementor. I tried Bricks. I actually successfully launched a Bricks website last week.
[00:16:52.580] – Kurt von Ahnen
So where does the use case come from for people that are like, They want to do one step more than core. They use the block editor, they use a template, they want to just tweak some things. What do you think is that use case that takes them over the edge and says, I need an element or I need a bricks, I need an automatic CSS? What trips them over that?
[00:17:22.400] – Kevin Geary
I think what trips them over that is aspirations, aspirations to do work at bigger scale or more projects. Be an agency, be a legit freelancer doing work for companies and wanting to have this control over what they’re doing. Let’s talk about going from Because you said you’re more of an implementer than maybe a developer. So one argument I’ve made, and I have a free course called Page Building 101 that anybody can do, and it actually is for this purpose. It’s basically saying, hey, do you essentially have page assembly skills, but you really don’t know how the underlying stuff is working? You don’t really know the CSS, you don’t really know the HTML, but you really want to level up your game because you do consider yourself to be a professional and you want to be confident in what you’re doing. That’s who page building 101 is for. I made the argument in that that you are far better off learning web design, the language of modern web design in a tool like like bricks or like oxygen or like any of these fully featured page builders than anywhere else. And then even over Elementor and Divi and so on.
[00:18:40.020] – Kevin Geary
And the reason being is because Elementor, Divi, and the block editor, we can put them all in the same category, have their own web design language. They do not respect or acknowledge the actual language of traditional web design. They’ve got their own proprietary way of doing things. So not only do you have to learn web design, you have to learn the proprietary way that these things do web design. So you have to learn two things on top of CSS, HTML concepts, all of that. With bricks, bricks is a page builder that respects the language of traditional web design in the modern era. And so if you understand web design, you understand bricks naturally. If you’re learning web design, all you have to really do is learn web design, and bricks will just facilitate the work that you happen to be doing. The idea that, again, my mom with the Bunko Club website, that the block editor is going to make her life somehow easier, is that is a false narrative because it is a proprietary environment that she’s going to have to learn, and she’s never going to use it to actually assemble a website.
[00:19:42.540] – Kevin Geary
The only thing my mom and the average person off the street. I’m just talking about grab a rando off the street and put them in front of WordPress, put them in front of the block editor and see what happens. I’ll tell you what’s going to happen. Nothing. Nothing’s going to happen unless you give them a full done template to start with, and then they can just start editing content and things like that. But they’re not going to just start assembling a page with no experience whatsoever, regardless of whether it’s in bricks or the block editor or anything else. They don’t even know the first thing. So what is the block editor What’s the editor for then? Well, it’s for people who want to edit content. That’s what it’s for. And if you’re writing a blog post, by the way, the block editor is fantastic. The blog editor is fantastic for writing blog posts. For page assembly, now you take someone like me. Am I going to build a page in bricks or am I I’m trying to build a page in the blog editor? Well, the blog editor would slow me down tremendously over what bricks offers, and I would have to have a ton of workarounds.
[00:20:37.320] – Kevin Geary
And someone like you who, let’s say you’re wanting to learn more about the development, well, the unfortunate reality of the block editor is that you’re going to have to introduce more languages. With bricks, I tell people HTML, CSS. That’s what we need to really get a firm grasp on. Go the block editor, it’s HTML, it’s CSS, it’s Jason, it’s probably some PHP stuff. You’re not just going to be working in the block editor. You got to understand what VS code is now. We got to bring a third-party tool into this thing. It’s way more. And so if they’re talking about making this easier to bring more people in and open this up to more people, that’s the opposite is happening in the block editor. The bricks environment is actually the easier environment to learn in because there’s less things to worry about. So that’s been my argument, and I’ve demonstrated this argument countless times. So that’s what I would say. It’s not making it easier on anybody.
[00:21:36.910] – Kurt von Ahnen
I’m just going to say thanks because you articulated that and explained it really, really well. Thank you for that.
[00:21:41.720] – Kevin Geary
You’re welcome.
[00:21:42.530] – Kurt von Ahnen
If I go on to the next question, it’s going to say, how can you explain to the audience, our listeners, our viewers, what are the critical concepts around this term intrinsic design? And what are your personal views on it being implicated with Gutenberg?
[00:21:57.540] – Kevin Geary
So intrinsic design, I think, is It’s a good concept. It was what? Jen Simmons? Yeah, it was Jen Simmons. Four or five years ago, something like that. She gave a talk on it.
[00:22:08.670] – Jonathan Denwood
One of the lead designers at Apple, I’ll be correct about that, would I not?
[00:22:14.380] – Kevin Geary
Yeah. So that talk, from what I remember, describing the modern era of web design, obviously, that’s exactly where web design needs to go and needs to be thinking about. For anybody that isn’t familiar familiar with intrinsic design, maybe a good way to explain it, if you think about, obviously we had responsive design, right? So responsive design, which became the norm. It’s like an agency that’s like, we build responsive websites. And so it’s like, blah. Okay, that’s what you’re supposed to be doing. It’s not like a selling point in 2024. But there’s a lot of ways to do responsive design. You can force design layout changes at different breakpoints. Imagine just a simple H1 heading that’s like 80 pixels on desktop. Okay, you want it to be smaller as the device gets smaller. So you might go from breakpoint to breakpoint to breakpoint to breakpoint, changing the font size. Well, congratulations. You made a responsive website, but that’s not an intrinsically designed website. So I think intrinsic design takes responsiveness to the next level of almost thinking about automatic responsiveness or fluid responsiveness, where now take a clamp function and apply it to that H1, and there are no breakpoints in play anymore.
[00:23:30.620] – Kevin Geary
There’s just math that’s scaling fluidly that heading down, and it’s not breakpoint-driven. I don’t really care what the device is. The math is going to math, and it’s going to work just fine on any device. That’s a very basic way of describing intrinsic design, and that’s where we need to go. Now, I think you asked how that relates to the block editor. How that relates to the block editor is the block editor-Can I just interrupt?
[00:23:56.490] – Jonathan Denwood
Yeah, go for it. Because it was one of Paul Adam’s, sorry, Adam’s, on his list of problems, it was one of these… He was devastating about how this very excellent idea, this concept, was actually done in WordPress. He was scathing about it, really, wasn’t he?
[00:24:24.400] – Kevin Geary
I didn’t hear his exact words, but one problem with the implementation of intrinsic design in the block editor, I think you could compare this to when Apple decided that nobody needed a headphones jack on phones anymore. It was early. Let’s Let me just say that. A lot of people still had cords and they couldn’t plug them in, and it created a big hoop lot, right? Well, Gutenberg decided that… Jen Simmons made this video on intrinsic design, so nobody needs breakpoints anymore. That was the conclusion that they came to. And so in the block editor, you have no way to do things at different breakpoints. You’re forced into the concept of intrinsic design, but you’re forced into the concept of intrinsic design too early, okay? We’re not there yet. We do still need breakpoints. But again, this is software that’s designed for everyone. And so the decision was, well, Kevin’s mom making that… She doesn’t know what a breakpoint is. She can’t deal with those icons up there. That’s going to be way too difficult for her. She’s going to get all confused. So we’re better off just not having them. Well, not having them punishes everybody.
[00:25:36.090] – Kevin Geary
Just so that we can make my mom, who’s never going to build anything in the block editor anyway, because she can’t, because she can’t even get started with it. I would have to build it for her and then just let her edit it. And guess what I need in order to really build it for her? I need the break.
[00:25:50.490] – Jonathan Denwood
After watching, sorry to interrupt, but watching Adam’s struggling to find a word to describe his view, but I did some research and I was godsmacked, absolutely gobsmacked, that you’re trying to tell people this is a professional tool. And in mobile design, you’re giving them no control mechanism. It’s just scandalous, really. And it just really shows to me how out of touch some of the leadership of this project is. Do you think I’m being too scathe in there?
[00:26:35.350] – Kevin Geary
No, I don’t think so. Notoriously, there’s a lack of communication. There’s a lack of communication before something is developed. There’s a lack of communication after something is developed. There’s a disconnect. This disconnect exists, by the way, across all tools for the most part. Element or Divi, the software developers that build these as tools, software development is obviously a very different skill from web development. And so if you have a software developer that doesn’t have any experience in web design with web design tools, building a web design tool, if they’re not talking to a lot of web designers, there’s going to be problems. There’s going to be problems. And I think that’s a big challenge. I think there’s a lot of people working on the block editor who don’t actually build websites in the real world. And so they’re making decisions based on theory and not on actual real-world experience. Experience, and I don’t know if there’s enough people correcting them or challenging those theories. They certainly don’t ask me much. I’ve been outspoken about problems with the block editor. People have said, Hey, I will have a discussion with you. I will come on your live stream.
[00:27:48.610] – Kevin Geary
I will. But we never seem to get it scheduled. And it’s just there’s a lack of communication. If we had better communication and they were more open to things that we had to say, But I’ve always felt like we’ve been excluded, that they don’t care.
[00:28:04.150] – Jonathan Denwood
I’ve got my own view about why this is because I think, and I want to make it clear to the audience, I’ve got no inside knowledge here. But in most of these situations, based on my experience, it’s always financially driven, something that you don’t understand. So It’s either mental illness. If you’re in a situation personally or in business, and you’re in a scenario that doesn’t make any sense to you, it’s either driven by mental illness or personality disorder, or it’s driven by finance. I think their decisions are driven by finance because I think automatic or desperate, in some ways, of getting this out there because I think they’re bleeding money. I think they’re getting through their 900 million runway at such a rate that you would be gassed at, Kevin. I think they’re chewing through money at a sizable rate, Kevin.
[00:29:22.730] – Kevin Geary
Yeah, I don’t have access to their financials, so obviously- None of us do. None of us do. We can theorize Now, I try my best to not ascribe motive to the decisions that people make. I want to give everybody the benefit of the doubt. I want to assume that they have the best of intentions. I would rather assume I would rather assume that it’s a communication problem. I would rather assume that it’s a leadership problem that doesn’t have any underlying motives or anything like that. You could be absolutely correct, but all we can do is speculate. What I choose What we’re going to focus on is what are the actual things that we can see and feel and touch that we have good criticisms and good arguments for? And that’s exactly what we’re talking about in these discussions. Those are the details and those are the things that we can hopefully change and hopefully change them sooner rather than later.
[00:30:20.750] – Jonathan Denwood
We really have covered question three in some ways by combining it with 2-3, because what you’re saying is I’ve I’ve brought my synopsis of maybe what is driving this deafness to the obvious, as I put it.
[00:30:38.860] – Kevin Geary
Let me add to this real quick, because when I talk about the lack of communication, as an example, just to give some examples, I had to put a poll on Twitter a year ago asking people if the block editor is a page builder or not a page builder, because I was being told two separate things. When I was criticizing it from the perspective of somebody who uses a page builder, what I I used to hear is, well, of course, because the block editor is not a page builder. But then I would hear, but we’re supposed to build patterns, and we’re supposed to add those patterns together. I’m like, what do you get when you add a lot of patterns together? You have a page. It sounds like a page builder to me. And then I put a poll on Twitter and I said, is the block editor a page builder? And guess what? The WordPress community didn’t even know. It was like 44 % to 60 or whatever. People saying yes, some people saying no. It was like split down the middle. So you can’t say that there’s really good communication when the ecosystem can’t even agree on the fundamental purpose or reality of the tool that we’re all discussing.
[00:31:43.450] – Kevin Geary
And that’s something that’s so easy to I can’t figure out. Intrinsic design. You can’t have intrinsic design without a lot of education. You can’t go from the days of non-responsive web to responsive web to intrinsic design. And it’s going from responsive to It’s very intrinsic, it’s very nuanced. It’s not a gigantic leap. To understand that nuance and to even know- Well, in some ways, I’m more critical than you, actually.
[00:32:12.810] – Jonathan Denwood
I just think having on the mobile level not given any mechanisms to override.
[00:32:25.810] – Kevin Geary
Correct, yeah.
[00:32:27.850] – Jonathan Denwood
I just didn’t realize that they were going down this path and it’s bonkers. It’s truly bonkers stuff. They don’t want to hear. They get resentful. They get malignant, actually. There’s a malignancy about their response. I don’t know what drives it, so I presume you don’t have all the facts in front of you. Because like I said to you before, based on my personal experience, it’s either personality disorder collectively or it’s financially driven and you don’t understand because you don’t understand the situation they’re facing. But that’s my interpretation.
[00:33:15.700] – Kevin Geary
Well, even if it’s financially driven, I mean, financially driven to me is like, why are you… If you need to get it out there, if you need to get adoption for it, don’t make these decisions that don’t make sense to anybody. Make the obvious decision of giving We will break points. If we’re just using breakpoints as an example, wouldn’t that get it out the door faster? Wouldn’t that get people to adopt faster? Literally every third party tool that I know of that integrates with the block editor added breakpoints. That is a page builder for the block editor. So It’s an obvious missing thing. And like I was about to say, if you’re going to go full intrinsic design, I’m all for like, guys, we’re moving to a different future. And in order to get there, first of all, I’m going to paint the picture of what that future looks like and why it’s so much better than the current reality so that you can buy in. And then I’m going to educate you all the way there to go, guys, we’re going to go to intrinsic design. Good luck. And just take away the breakpoints And then not educate anybody on the tools that are required for intrinsic design and just leave them hanging inside this thing that they already are mostly objecting to.
[00:34:26.310] – Kevin Geary
This is just not a winning scenario in any playbook. So We have to go back to basics. Going back to basics, that’s the era WordPress is in. If I was going to define it, WordPress is in the go back to basics era. You started as a fantastic CMS, you abandon the CMS, get back to basics, make the CMS amazing in the modern era. Then we can talk about a builder, but we have to have a lot of discussions about what that builder-What are we going to do in the second half?
[00:34:54.900] – Jonathan Denwood
Thank you for that, Kevin. That’s a good place to end the first half of the show. It’s going to be, I I think more… Well, I was going to say that. I think it’s been a very constructive discussion. Thank you so much, Kevin. I think you’ve explained things very coherently. We’re going to go for our middle break, folks. We will be back with this ongoing, fantastic discussion. We’ll be back in a few moments, folks. Three, two, one. We’re coming back, folks. Kevin has been a bit more softer around good, bigger than myself. I’ll be vicious, haven’t I? I’ll be vicious with some of my whip lashing. It’s just wanting the best for WordPress and frustration. I think it showed really from the response of much more milder people than me, Paul from WP Tuts, Adam from WP Crafter. When you have such moderate and coherent people attacking quite vehemently, you know something is up, folks. Don’t matter how far you got your head up your rear. So on to the next question. If you were put in charge of… Some people don’t like me saying Gutenberg, they say it’s WordPress. I see where they come, but I do actually see it as a separate issue because they haven’t really done much with the the basics of the rest of it.
[00:36:32.750] – Jonathan Denwood
All the resources have just gone into this god-forsaken project, in my opinion. And that’s just frustration. I don’t really mean that because I do honestly think it could be turned around quite rapidly. It might take a year, but it could be turned around quite rapidly. So if you were put in charge and you were willing to do it, Kevin, you were put in charge of this project, what would be the first 2-3 things that you would want to implement around this? Be realistic here, Kevin. Things that could actually be done in a 6-12 month period that would fundamentally make the scenario better, Kevin.
[00:37:24.140] – Kevin Geary
Well, first of all, to D123’s comment down here, you have to call it Gutenberg. It’s It is not WordPress. The block editor is the Gutenberg project. The Gutenberg plugin is ahead of the thing and you can try out new stuff. But the block editor came from the Gutenberg project, okay? And if people ask, why is the WordPress CMS so outdated? Well, I can’t say because it’s WordPress. But what I can say is because of Gutenberg. Now we know. See, if we talk about them as two separate things because they are two separate things, we can actually have a meaningful discussion. They are two separate things. And so let’s talk about maybe some things that I would do. First of all, I would recommit immediately on day one to the CMS. The content management Management System is the core of WordPress. There are a lot of problems with the content management system in the modern era. They were fine back when we were in the era of blogging. They’re not fine anymore, and nothing has been done to advance this. And so we have to recommit. We’re missing core functionality that a modern CMS would have that we’re reliant on plugins for, that we should not be reliant on plugins for.
[00:38:39.120] – Kevin Geary
Those things have now proven themselves so valuable that they need to be in core. And so if we recommitted, and by the way, let’s go back to the number one selling point of WordPress, and this is wordpress. Org, the open source software that we all know and love. Open source is the number one selling feature. It is the number one benefit owning your data, not being beholden to anybody else, the freedom to publish, yada, yada, yada. Okay, that’s the biggest selling point. Well, guess what? We need to do that really, really, really well. We need a really great CMS, okay? Because that’s where our data lives. So let’s recommit to the CMS. That’s step one, day one. And I think that makes everybody happy. Because everybody that uses WordPress needs WordPress to be a better CMS. I’ve talked very lately on my channel. I’ve in-depth videos on URL architecture and the problems with how archaic the CMS is when it comes to segmenting your content out, relating your content to other content. We’re living in 2007 instead of 2024 with the CMS. Recommitting the CMS would make everybody happy. That would be step one. Step two, I would say that the block editor, it is an experimental editor.
[00:39:57.650] – Kevin Geary
So when D123 says that That was the Gutenberg is an experiment, that is 100% fact. It is an experiment. It is a completely new way of doing things. It is a completely proprietary way of doing things. It is not proven. I would immediately on day one make that opt-in. It needs to go back to being a plugin. Wordpress is a CMS. If you love the block editor and you want to bolt it on, go ahead and bolt it on. But we’re not going to force it down your throat in the current state that it’s in. It’s not fair, it’s not ready, it’s not any of the things that it needs to be to force it on 40% of the Internet. People can opt into it when it’s a standalone plugin, and then we’ll really see, that’s actually market competition. Let’s see what happens with it. We know that a lot of people opt out of it. There is a plugin where you can opt out, and we know it’s insanely popular for a reason. So I would do that. What would the third thing be? I would open all lines of communication. So if I’m going to start building an editor of any kind.
[00:41:00.720] – Kevin Geary
I’m bringing in agency owners, I’m bringing in freelancers. I’m bringing in my mom. I’m bringing in anybody that’s going to use this thing so that we can actually have a real understanding of what their needs are and how practical it is. And then we’re going to put a strategy together of, because there are two fundamental ways to do this. You can start from a beginner, and then you can try to build advanced features in. That’s what the block editor does. I think that’s a losing strategy. I think it’s proven to be a losing strategy. It’s much easier to start with the advanced tool and then hide all the stuff that confuses a beginner. You work backwards. And by the way, if we look at why is WordPress so popular, it’s the people that are actually doing all the work in WordPress, building the sites for people that make it popular. It was the page builders that came along and opened the door to, guess what? Wordpress doesn’t just have to be a blog anymore. Look at all this stuff you could do with these page builders. The elementers, the divvies, as much as I rag on them, they’re one of the big reasons why WordPress spread like wildfire.
[00:42:00.980] – Kevin Geary
So we have to give professionals, the people who know and love the work and know the language of web design, the tools they need to do this work the best possible way, the scalable way, the maintainable way, the accessible way, give them the tools that they need. And then when a person like my mom comes in and just needs to edit content, that is the easily solvable challenge. The easiest challenge to solve is how do I make it easy for her to come in and edit something that somebody else already did? That is not a hard problem to solve. But it is a very hard problem to make an entire interface for my mom that then a professional can come in and feels at home with.
[00:42:44.530] – Jonathan Denwood
I can’t argue. Honestly, I can’t really argue with anything you really outlined, really. It just seems pretty much common sense to me. But unfortunately, there are people and forces in the WordPress community that are not having it. Over to you, Kurt.
[00:43:03.320] – Kurt von Ahnen
No, and I just want to comment. That was a really great way to phrase all that, especially the part about the open communication. I’ve worked in multiple industries. Jonathan will tell you I’ve had way too many jobs in my life. Every time I have the aspiration of getting to the top, getting to the crystal office up top, I’m amazed when you finally get there, you think they have all the wisdom about whatever their industry or their vertical is. That’s when you find out they’ve never been on the ground. They’ve never run the cash register at a retail store. They’ve never greeted a customer in a service aisle. And so they’re making all these programs and rules, but they don’t have any clue as to how it works in the field. And you can see that, like this WordPress 6.6, to Jonathan’s point, people that I’ve never seen be negative before just jumped out on YouTube and started saying horrendous things. And I was like, wow, I think the straw has finally broken this camel’s back. I think people have finally had it.
[00:43:59.220] – Jonathan Denwood
Well, I think they I think reasonable people have just had enough of this propaganda bullshit that comes from a certain group of people in the WordPress community. They just had a stomach full of it.
[00:44:13.690] – Kevin Geary
I’ve had a lot of conversations with people, and I’ve gotten the profile down of the people who really love the block editor. And that profile is people who live in VS Code. They’re building custom blocks, and they’re very comfortable in React and PHP and all of these various languages. And like I said, go back to the Elementor crowd, the divi crowds, the page builders that really helped WordPress spread like wildfire. The people using these tools don’t live in that world. And the block editor says, Hey, we’re for everybody. If you’re for everybody, why the people who love it the most spend all their time in VS Code, not the block editor? This is this fundamental disconnect. And if we’re talking about not talking to people in the field, like Kurt was mentioning, go back to the breakpoints thing. If you were sitting in a room, I have a full development team. We’re constantly having conversations about features in automatic CSS, features in frames in our upcoming etch product. These are going to be used by lots and lots and lots of people. If you have something like breakpoints, somebody says, Guys, there’s this thing called intrinsic design.
[00:45:24.210] – Kevin Geary
That’s where things are moving. I think we should get rid of the breakpoints. They’re all going to have a debate about that. They should have a debate I’m afraid about that. These should be people that actually build websites. With something like breakpoints, I can guarantee you it wouldn’t take 30 seconds to come to the conclusion that we can’t just remove the breakpoints. Somebody would make an argument and say, But it’s going to confuse Kevin’s mom. She’s not going to know what the breakpoints are, and she’s going to have a bad experience. They’re going to be like, They have to be there. We’re not there yet. They have to be there.
[00:45:51.270] – Jonathan Denwood
It’s even worse than that, really, Kevin, because they come out with this ridiculous argument, it’s going to be run by committee, allowing the A period of open discussion, allow people from the community to have input and then have a group, a smaller group that actually looks at input and comes with a strategy and plan and says, This is where we’re going, and then publish it with logical arguments why this is the best. That’s an adult way of running things. That’s not committee, is it?
[00:46:25.560] – Kevin Geary
Are you saying that it’s done by committee and that’s why we have what we have?
[00:46:29.450] – Jonathan Denwood
No, we don’t even know how it’s-Right, there’s not a lot of things-We don’t even know how it’s run because it’s all smoking mirrors, isn’t it?
[00:46:39.160] – Kevin Geary
What I would guess, the experience that I have is a committee did not come to the conclusion that the breakpoint should not be in the block editor. That is a decision that was made by a single person, most likely overriding what other people were saying about the presence of breakpoints in the block editor. Because any committee that spend any time building websites, that’s the first thing you know you need. The idea of removing it would be no small task. Anybody on that committee would say, if we do remove it, there has to be mass education as to why we’re removing it, what the vision is, and how we’re going to build websites without these things. Everybody’s going to wonder where they are at all times. It’s going to be a constant PR nightmare. That’s a huge decision. To me, there was a committee, probably all that stuff was talked about, and somebody overrode, essentially just put their foot down and said, No, it’s not going to have it. Let’s move forward, figure it out.
[00:47:40.080] – Jonathan Denwood
I don’t think we need to go to question five because I think you’ve made some of your thoughts about AI when it comes to web design.
[00:47:53.640] – Kevin Geary
We can go into AI.
[00:47:56.240] – Jonathan Denwood
Bud?
[00:47:57.020] – Kevin Geary
We can go into AI.
[00:47:58.100] – Jonathan Denwood
You want to go into AI? I’m going to throw it over to Kirk. You would have put it.
[00:48:02.130] – Kurt von Ahnen
He leaves it to me. If we just touch on the AI thing, just from a standpoint, when it first came out, I was not a fan. Then Jonathan glossed me over to a couple of tools, and then other people glossed me over to a couple of tools, and I could see where there was productivity helps. But I still believe it only augments a professional’s work. It’s not replacing the professional. I’m having issues with people, like your point at the beginning of the show, hit our AI generator and generate a site in five minutes. You’re like, no. I actually did it with Cadence’s AI site builder thing, and it built a construction website quickly, but it was nothing that could be used. It was placeholder content, but it wasn’t stuff that could be really used.
[00:48:51.010] – Jonathan Denwood
Well, there’s nothing wrong with placeholder content, to some degree. It helps a bit, doesn’t it? I totally agree with your statement. I’m sorry to interrupt, Kevin. I’ve been doing that a little bit, haven’t I? I think I’ve been constructive in my little things, haven’t I, Kevin? You’ve seen that he had sought me out if he wasn’t happy, folks. He’d get hold of me and smacked me That’s what you find quite easily. I think what Kirk said, Kevin, is totally logical. What’s your own thoughts?
[00:49:25.040] – Kevin Geary
Yeah, it’s an augmenting tool right now. That’s the best way to It’s not where it needs to be to one click, do what you’re asking. Hey, make me a mechanics website, and it’s got to have these pages. I really wanted to convert to this offer right here. And then poof, it appears, right? It could get to that one day.
[00:49:49.880] – Jonathan Denwood
It could be like me, Kevin. I go poof.
[00:49:52.400] – Kevin Geary
We don’t have a crystal ball. I can tell you it’s not there right now, right? And there’s going to be a progression in getting there. And what I’m trying to communicate to developers and designers and people who consider themselves to be a professional in this industry is that the lower level projects you do, the lower level work that you do, the less technical the work is, the less you have a marketer’s mind. If you can’t help your client understand how their website fits into a bigger picture of generating traffic and sales and leads and attention and on and on and on, you are going to get replaced first. So that This is, I think, one thing that’s undeniable about AI. Just like I ask people about blogging, Hey, can AI produce a blog article? And they’ll say, well, it’s about buzz feed level blog quality. Okay, well, good. All the buzz We don’t need article writers. We don’t need them anymore, do we? They’re low-level writers. They’re not quality writers. They got replaced first.
[00:50:53.700] – Jonathan Denwood
You’re talking about the chocolate factory here also. You mentioned the chocolate factory Actually, yeah, Kevin, in your criticism.
[00:51:02.510] – Kevin Geary
That’s all I’m trying to get as far as a point is you don’t want to be the person doing low-level work in the modern era, in the AI era, because you will get replaced first. There is some things I think that AI just can’t ever do in terms of, for example, understanding-Well, when it does, we got bigger worries, don’t we? That’s correct. When it really can start mapping human feelings and deeper understanding-We’ve got some slight other problems.
[00:51:32.550] – Jonathan Denwood
Web design ain’t going to be one of them, is it?
[00:51:35.590] – Kevin Geary
Exactly, yeah. When we get there, we’ll cross that bridge. Right now, it’s mostly income.
[00:51:43.080] – Jonathan Denwood
Good old Elon is already planning our total redundancy, isn’t he? He’s got his ticket to Mars, isn’t he?
[00:51:49.960] – Kevin Geary
Yeah, even with AI, I’d have to tell the AI, Well, I want you… Because I want to be able to maintain the site.
[00:51:55.200] – Jonathan Denwood
We’re not the chosen ones, Kevin. We’re just workers, mate. We’re not the chosen one for the starship to Mars, are we? We are unworthy to spread our genetic seed any further, aren’t we, Kevin?
[00:52:09.150] – Kevin Geary
This is-This is taking a turn.
[00:52:13.160] – Jonathan Denwood
This is the English I’m not cares if I’m coming out, really. Sorry, I went off the fin. Yeah, I see we’re going. So let’s go to last. I think we asked you, but if you had your own time machine, H. G. Wells or The TARDIS, Doctor Who. You could go back and just tell yourself one little thing, one little tip to the younger Kevin. Is there any little whisper, little tip? It doesn’t have to be something really mind-blowing, but maybe you could. Is there anything you want to tell yourself? Like, Don’t come on this show.
[00:52:56.180] – Kevin Geary
No. I would say, in general, go bigger, go faster. I’ve tended in the past to… I feel like I haven’t gone at the pace I could be going at for various reasons.
[00:53:13.440] – Jonathan Denwood
I’m a very slow learner, but I get there eventually. Kirk will testify. I’m an applauder at heart. I’ve accepted it, Kevin. I’m applause.
[00:53:24.730] – Kevin Geary
That’s all right. Hey, some people prefer the pace.
[00:53:28.450] – Jonathan Denwood
I don’t give up much, though, do I? Would you agree with that, Kirk?
[00:53:33.660] – Kurt von Ahnen
A little on the tenacious side.
[00:53:35.170] – Jonathan Denwood
Yeah, I am tenacious, which is good all day. All right, I think we can end it now. We’re giving Gutenberg a good kick-in, haven’t we, Kevin? Kicked it around the plate.
[00:53:49.760] – Kevin Geary
Same time next month, same date.
[00:53:52.610] – Jonathan Denwood
They won’t listen. But to finish off, I don’t think they’re giving up on it. They’re on this 10a 10-year plan that seemed to come from nowhere. Nobody told me we’d be on a 10-year march on a software project that should have been done in a year or less.
[00:54:12.480] – Kevin Geary
Ten years is a very long time. A lot changes in the internet.
[00:54:15.640] – Jonathan Denwood
That’s one of the most ridiculous statements ever told to me on my show.
[00:54:21.950] – Kevin Geary
When that came up, It was like a 100-year hosting plan, if we’re being honest.
[00:54:29.280] – Jonathan Denwood
You got. You got a worrying insight there, but I don’t want to go there too much, and that’s even me saying that. But it’s linked to… Yeah, let’s not go there. That’s too personal. I think you gave your three steps here, but my take on it is I believe all the things you outlined would agree with, but a more gradual thing would be not one more fundamental change to it for the next six months and a public statement that we’re going to have a review, and in the meantime, we’re going to deal with some of the painful UX and usability problems. But I’m not even sure, based on your input, which I will have to think of, That’s possible. It might need a just; This has gone wrong. We need to turn it around. We need to fundamentally change the whole outlook of this project because adding more functionality to it is not the answer. I think both of us would agree with that. Would you agree with that?
[00:55:54.720] – Kevin Geary
I would.
[00:55:56.780] – Jonathan Denwood
Right, Kevin, what’s the best way for people to find out more about you and your views and ideas, Kevin?
[00:56:03.650] – Kevin Geary
Yeah, go to Geary, that’s G-E-A-R-Y. Co. That’s pretty much my central hub. You’ll find everything there.
[00:56:11.700] – Jonathan Denwood
Because my dad told me the one thing with dealing with a problem, Jonathan, the first thing you got to do is stop digging, Jonathan. The first thing in dealing with a fundamental issue, folks, is to stop digging your own grave. That’s 101 of problem-solving. Stop digging. Then you can work out a plan of action, but you have to stop digging. Kurt, what is the best way for people to learn more about you?
[00:56:42.080] – Kurt von Ahnen
Manana Nomas is the name of the agency, and just about everything online leads to me. That’s Manana Nomas. Then LinkedIn, I’m always active on LinkedIn. I’m on there every day. Before we end the show, I want to point viewers and listeners to Kevin Geary’s YouTube channel. As someone who does a lot of adult education, Kevin, your Page Builder 101 course has communicated well. For people looking up their game, I want to encourage people to check it out.
[00:57:07.680] – Kevin Geary
Thank you.
[00:57:08.420] – Jonathan Denwood
I think Kevin’s passionate, wants the best for WordPress and is an extremely good educator. These are not easy discussions. There is no right or wrong here. But people need to be honest, respectful, and semi-passionate. Because we all want the? We will return next week with another fantastic discussion, folks, with a great guest. We’ll see you soon. Bye.
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