It’s exciting to see the Drupal Gutenberg project getting under way, it makes me proud of the work we’ve done ensuring the flexibility of the underlying Gutenberg architecture. One of the primary philosophies of Gutenberg’s technical architecture is platform agnosticism, and we can see the practical effects of this practice coming to fruition across a variety of projects.
Yoast are creating new features for the block editor, as well as porting existing features, which they’re able to reuse in the classic editor.
Outside of WordPress Core, the Automattic teams who work on Calypso have been busy adding Gutenberg support, in order to make the block editor interface available on WordPress.com. Gutenberg and Calypso are large JavaScript applications, built with strong opinions on design direction and technical architecture, and having significant component overlap. That these two projects can function together at all is something of an obscure engineering feat that’s both difficult and overwhelming to appreciate.
If we reached the limit of Gutenberg’s platform agnosticism here, it would still be a successful project.
But that’s not where the ultimate goals of the Gutenberg project stand. From early experiments in running the block editor as a standalone application, to being able to compile it into a native mobile component, and now seeing it running on Drupal, Gutenberg’s technical goals have always included a radical level of platform agnosticism.
Better Together
Inside the WordPress world, significant effort and focus has been on ensuring backwards compatibility with existing WordPress sites, plugins, and practices. Given that WordPress is such a hugely popular platform, it’s exceedingly important to ensure this is done right. With Gutenberg expanding outside of the WordPress world, however, we’re seeing different focuses and priorities arise.
The Gutenberg Cloud service is a fascinating extension being built as part of the Drupal Gutenberg project, for example. It provides a method for new blocks to be shared and discovered, the sample hero block sets a clear tone of providing practical components that can be rapidly put together into a full site. While we’ve certainly seen similar services appear for the various site builder plugins, this is the first one (that I’m aware of, at least) build specifically for Gutenberg.
By making the Gutenberg experience available for everyone, regardless of their technical proficiency, experience, or even preferred platform, we pave the way for a better future for all.
Democratising Publishing
You might be able to guess where this is going. 😉
WordPress’ mission is to “democratise publishing”. It isn’t to “be the most popular CMS”, or to “run on old versions of PHP”, though it’s easy to think that might be the case on the surface. That these statements are true is simply a side effect of the broader principle: All people, regardless of who they are or where they come from, should be able to publish their content as part of a free and open web.
The WordPress mission is not to “democratise publishing with WordPress”.
WordPress has many advantages that make it so popular, but hoarding those to ourselves doesn’t help the open web, it just creates more silos. The open web is the only platform on which publishing can be democratised, so it makes sense for Gutenberg to work anywhere on the open web, not just inside WordPress. Drupal isn’t a competitor here, we’re all working towards the same goal, the different paths we’ve taken have made the open web stronger as a whole.
Much as the block editor has been the first practical implementation of the Gutenberg architecture, WordPress is simply the first practical integration of the block editor into a CMS. The Gutenberg project will expand into site customisation and theming next, and while there’s no requirement that Drupal make use of these, I’d be very interested to see what they came up with if they did. Bringing together our many years of experience in tackling these complex problems can only make the end result better.
I know I’m looking forward to all of us working together for the betterment of the open web.
This is so cool!