“The GPL is meant to be restrictive for developers and permissive for users.” ~ WordPress co-founder Mike Little

The basis of my blog

This website is built on the WordPress content management system (CMS). WordPress is literally its foundation.

Back in the late 1990s, a year or two after I bought my first computer, I began building websites. I learned basic HTML then adopted one of the first WSIWYG authoring tools, Adobe PageMill. I learned some CSS code and moved with the times, to Adobe DreamWeaver. I offered my new skills to clients who hired me to make photos. “You need a website.” It was good.

Then, I reached a point where keeping up with advances began to interfere with photography. I mean, I was making the move to digital photography at the same time. I didn’t want to become a website designer.

I was also looking for an easier way to edit and maintain my own website. I’d been watching with interest the evolution of WordPress since young entrepreneurs Matt Mullenweg and Mike Little launched the blogging platform, in 2003. But I wasn’t a blogger. The most intriguing thing about the organization was its political structure: a democratic, open-source project (under the GNU General Public License (GPL), version 2) cooperatively developed by volunteers.

Liberty and fraternity

Anyone can download the free version at WordPress.org and use it. That remains the self-hosted version installed on servers and used by millions. A parallel option exists at WordPress.com where users can create a free or full-featured, paid site.

As the platform matured into a full-fledged CMS, I took the plunge and laboriously converted all my content (from another website) and loaded it on a WordPress-based site. I even attended a couple of “Word Camps.” The seminars were helpful and I met some nice people, but ultimately had a slight odour of cultishness I didn’t care for. Nevertheless, I became an evangelist of sorts, recommending the self-hosted version and suggesting WordPress.com to people who might not be ready to host their own sites. I did some free tutoring.

Without getting technical, as I’ve said, WordPress is the “engine” that powers what you interact with here. The visual styling and meta-functions are provided by a “theme.”

When I adopted WordPress, a decade ago, I decided almost immediately to spring for a “premium” theme from a third-party developer. I chose the popular Thesis theme. And soon regretted it. Not because it wasn’t a great theme, but because its creator was insufferably arrogant.

Millennial pissing contest

Without going into the complexities of the politics surrounding third-parties building a business on open-source, the very public war that erupted between WordPress CEO Matt Mullenweg and Thesis’ Chris Pearson made me question my decision to adopt both products. Pearson is both a savvy pioneer in commercial themes and a whiny libertarian who wanted other people’s cake so he could put icing on it and make money. During the contretemps, he acted like a 2-year-old throwing a tantrum in WalMart, but neither young turk escaped without egg on their faces … if you’ll excuse the melange of cooking metaphors.

That was in 2010.

Apparently, the enmity has not cooled. But I’m not here to report on the testosterone levels of these two testy Millennials.

Finding peace and productivity

When it came to developing this site no way I was going to support Thesis. Anyway the (belated) release of Thesis 2.0 in 2012 forced a complete rebuild and massive learning curve on users with its visual template editor based on “boxes.” I looked outside the box for another option. I discovered and learned how to modify the theme this site uses. It didn’t come cheap.

But it gave me exactly what I wanted in a photography-oriented design and, critically, the developers are for the most part responsive and supportive. Above all, the UI is intuitive and relatively simple to use, satisfying my decade-long pursuit of time-management.

I’m one of those people who can’t afford to hire a web design company, who likes to tinker, and has enough basic skills to manage their own website, given the aforementioned technical aids.

Still, self-hosting a WordPress site comes with its frustrations: one has to field problems with hosting, plugin conflicts and bugs (WordPress’s Achilles heel), the Google (!)/ SEO, security and a hundred other things.

Then came Gutenberg

Late last week, like a stinky political press release dropped on a Friday, WordPress released version 5.0, at the same time replacing its classic word editor with Gutenberg, a block-based page builder. It is an abomination and an insult to the memory of old Johannes. Today, around the world, tens of thousands of webmasters, journalists and bloggers are howling.

Bad. Terrible. Awful. Horrible. Catastrophic. These are a few of the kinder adjectives turning up in reviews of the new editor. So far, it has received over 1200 1-star ratings against just 403 5-stars (some of which are mistakes — reviews default to 5-star if you don’t change them) and the outrage continues to pour in.

Perhaps more representative of Gutenberg’s reception is the fact that over 900,000  1 million   2 million (22/1/19) WordPress users have resorted to installing the Classic Editor plugin, a kind of consolation prize for the disgruntled.  Disable Gutenberg, a plugin featuring more granular settings, promising support beyond 2022, has seen 100,000 installs (22/1/19). Meanwhile, Gutenberg, integrated into WordPress core, is causing endless problems, bugs, plugin conflicts, code bloat, slow performance and generally crashing around people’s sites like a bull in a china shop.

My own experience parallels others’ who are complaining: Rather than simplifying writing and page editing, Gutenberg introduced mind-numbing complexity, combined with straight out dysfunction, missing features … an absolute amateurish mess. Faced with one glitch after another, I gave up preparing a post and went to bed. But I couldn’t sleep, wondering what I might do to save my site.

As many have asked: What were they thinking? It’s hard to know. Do Mullenweg et al. feel a need to compete with the likes of commercial website builders and hosts Wix and Weebly that claim ease of use? They are based on block editors.

The irony for me is that I ended up with WordPress as a way to streamline and simplify my site building experience so that I could concentrate on my business.

Thank goodness I’m not a developer who relies on WordPress for a living. Many of those people today are dealing with thousands of compromised sites and unhappy clients.

But WordPress developers are unmoved. The Gutenberg project has been around in beta for some time. Testers have been less than impressed. People who know a lot more about code than I do warned of the impending disaster. WordPress forged ahead regardless. Evidently, as one developer noted, “the Javascript kiddies have taken over.”

Whoever is in charge, they have risked an insurrection among word serfs around the world and made a lot of people angry … not just angry, but disappointed and hurt. A great many — and I count myself among those — feel deserted and ignored. We put our trust in what seemed like a cooperative and inclusive endeavour only to be kicked in the teeth. Because, as of this writing, WordPress is still ignoring the furor.

So, what’s the problem? The Classic Editor has been provided as a plugin. Yes, but with the proviso that its maintenance will be finite. What they appear to be saying is this: OK laggards, if you must cling to the past, here’s your outdated editor, but be aware we are going to phase that out, so (as one apologist put it) learn to adapt.

Goodbye WordPress?

I notice that Wix and Squarespace have been plastering the Interwebs with advertising lately. Perhaps, with Gutenberg pending, they smelled blood. Actually, if WordPress is going to foist a really bad block-based editor on us why wouldn’t I consolidate everything under one roof at Wix? It would simplify my life and, if I audited the costs associated with self-hosting, I’d probably save myself a bundle. But it would also eliminate the independence and level of creativity I have built over the years using WordPress. It would also cut off funds from the hosting company and developers of premium theme and plugins that I presently use.

This is the last thing I wanted to write on a Monday. I’d much rather be doing what I love. WordPress, with this capricious move, has jeopardized bringing that to my audience.

And Chris Pearson is having a good old laugh.