| That's only part of the story. WordPress provides hooks that make it possible to alter the editing experience in the first place. It would be far cheaper to simply alter the API's to stop making this possible. Of course, that would break a ton of plugins and turn away a chunk of the community. So, the big question still remains: why offering a fundamentally different editing experience through Gutenberg and block editing? While wp.com and wp.org are different organizations, they are tightly intertwined through code, functionality and a shared design vision. WordPress itself has come a long way from it's original value proposition: a tool for bloggers. Today, it's used as a platform for managing media experiences that powers a big part of the marketing and online communication & publishing industry. There's big money in being able to sell a seamless, integrated, flexible editing experience that allows publishers to quickly design and publish online flyers, set up marketing / advertising / informational campaigns and so on. WordPress isn't the only CMS that moves towards such an integrated media experience. Others, like Drupal / Acquia, are on a single trajectory as well. And then there's plenty of CMS'es like CraftCMS, OctoberCMS, Ghost and so on. The downside is that the adding a layer of bells and whistles to the UI, as well as the added complexity to the theming API (block themes,...) tend to alienate the original user base. Many of those used WordPress because it sat at that sweet spot of being able to relatively easily deploy, customize and publish on your own personal weblog. Sure enough, WordPress still offers to create your own blog. But it's not the same tool as it was some 18 years ago. Neither is the Web the same as it was 18 years ago. And so, to many of its original users, wondering whether WordPress is still the right tool to maintain a personal blog in this day and age is a very real question. |