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[a quote from Ed Catmull’s book Creativity Inc.] made me think a lot about the early days of Gutenberg and the huge resistance it had in the community, including causing the fork of ClassicPress. Now that we’re much further along there’s a pretty widespread acceptance of Gutenberg, and it’s responsible for the vast majority of all WP posts and pages made, however if we had taken a vote for whether it should happen or not, it probably wouldn’t have ever gotten off the ground.
What’s funny is if you go back even further, using a visual WYSIWYG editor in the first place was very controversial, and many people didn’t want the classic editor brought into WordPress.
Long-term WordPresser here; I remember when 2.0 integrated TinyMCE and it was absolutely necessary to ensure that raw HTML editing remained an option, clear and up-front. Which I’m glad of: I probably hit raw HTML about once a month when I’m blogging, to this day!
I was among those who strongly resisted Gutenberg. Nowadays I use it every day! But my primary personal blog, which was already almost six years old when it migrated to WordPress 1.2 back in 2004, still uses the classic editor. I enjoy that I have the freedom to do that.
When we talk about open source meaning freedom, this is the kind of thing we mean. Years ago, I was in charge of the CMS for a major academic institution when the company behind that CMS made a gradual and concerted effort to become less-open-source. That CMS didn’t have the ecosystem and community around it that WordPress has, and so no forks took off, and so my employer got locked-in to upgrading to a new version that was mostly-closed-source and was in some ways inferior. Ugh.
(Incidentally, I got them off that CMS: they’re now using a mixture of WordPress and Drupal for most of their systems. Open source won.)
Change isn’t always good. But open source provides the freedom to embrace change in the way that suits you best.
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