[chiefalchemist]

Gutenberg shipped way too soon. It has been a textbook case of how not to launch a product. Solid idea...horrendous execution. Mullenweg owes the WP community a massive apology. He especially owes the #a11y Community an apology. Hint: In either case don't hold your breath.

But more importantly, it should not be in core. Full stop. Once WP became REST-driven the push should have been to lighten core. That is to decouple as muxh as possible. Core is that _core_. Then you configure your needs from there. Core should be the basics, as light and as lean as possible.

But instead, more and more unnecessary bloat. More and more features with less and less benefit.

Yes, I'm looking at CraftCMS and others as well. WP has jumped the shark. It's not going away. But I'm tired of having to shower after everytime I work with it.

[rmccue]

WordPress has never internalised the ideas of API-first development or the ability to have a lightweight core, and to this day it’s still treated as an addon piece that could someday be removed.

(Source: I wrote the REST API in WordPress and lead the API team for many years.)

[chiefalchemist]

Exactly. Let's make removable the piece that is the most industry standard compliant. The pieces that maximizes the flexibility of "the appliance". If GB came first, I'd agree with you. As we know, it did not.

But instead let's force feed - oops, I mean ship - and bake in a product (i.e., GB) that was half-baked technology implementation and barely an afterthought in terms of user experience. (Note: UX in this case includes all the devs who were begged to jump on board, and then jerked around like a puppy on the leash.)

WP core should be a service. Lean, tight and clean. Tightly coupling more and more likely unnecessary features to that doesn't help anyone. Trying to maintain that monolith is overly complicated. And so on.

We have the plugin architecture. If it's broken, then let's fix it. If it needs some sort of dependency manager, then let's talk about thst as well.

But Gutenberg? That makes 2020 look like a summer holiday, and we all know how bad 2020 has been :)

[rado]

Meanwhile, the core lacks: multilingual, CDN support, caching. Essentials.

[mtberatwork]

CDN support out of the box isn't essential, most sites will never achieve the kind of traffic that merits a CDN. However, to add to your list: database migrations, task queues, middleware, form validation, templating, dependency management, unified plugin framework, etc. No lack of callback soup though.

[LordAtlas]

Even something basic like a way to categorise and manage your media library is missing without freakin' plugins.

[chiefalchemist]

Those don't belong in core either. Core should focus strictly on the being a rock solid foundation. Plugins are there to supplement that. That's the beauty of the architecture. Or at least, is supposed to be.

WordPress should not have the same mindset as Jetpack. Oops? Did I just say that?? ;)

[rado]

WP is useless without CDN and caching.

[chiefalchemist]

It depends on how you're using it. It depends on the resources you have for such things. WP can and will work without them.