We’ve been working hard on a little in-house project here at Illustrate Digital. It’s an idea that was birthed in December by our amazing design and development teams and focuses on the latest technology for WordPress.
Would you like to hear more..?
A bit of background.
‘Gutenberg’, the new content editing tool for WordPress, was a project first started in early 2017 by the core design and development team at WordPress. In late 2018, as part of the new WP 5.0, Gutenberg was released.
The reason for a new editor was obvious to anyone who had used the classic editor in WordPress. The old editor was simple enough that it didn’t do very much and oddly complicated enough (and over-engineered by many development agencies) that it could often be impossible to work with.
It was time for change and Gutenberg was set to be that change.
Our involvement with Gutenberg.
As a team of people who specialise in building sites and software using the WordPress platform, when Gutenberg was first released (initially as a plugin) we took the decision to begin testing how it works in practice. We were considering how it would be used on client sites and we must admit that was a difficult one to get our heads around at first.
When Gutenberg finally did launch in December 2018 we can’t say we were ‘ready’, but we had plenty of practice at least. And so in the same month it was launched we got to work on planning and designing thegutenbergsite.com.
We knew that Gutenberg was going to revolutionise the content management experience of WordPress. And so, despite feeling like we were wandering into the darkness, we embarked on a journey to bring the new editor into our business.
Whilst ‘The Gutenberg Site‘ was still being designed, we decided to implement the new editor on several client sites and are really pleased with the results. Even though there were some compromises and hurdles to get through at first, our clients are loving the new editing experience we’ve been able to offer.
Say hello to ‘The Gutenberg Site’.
Despite already working with Gutenberg on some client sites, the idea of also having our own space to test and play around, without messing up a client’s website, is a pretty great idea. On top of this, we wanted The Gutenberg Site to be somewhere we could challenge ourselves. To create a truly special front-end experience, whilst still making the most of the flexible content editing that Gutenberg has to offer.
And so The Gutenberg Site is alive. It took us a good few months, working hard amongst our regular client work, but we’ve managed to make it happen and we’re confident we’ve produced some pretty special results.
Hopefully you’ll agree that the site offers a unique user experience, whilst explaining and displaying Gutenberg in a clear and understandable way.
A resource for everyone.
In the spirit of open source, we really want the site to be a useful resource for everyone. If you need to learn more about the Gutenberg editor, how to develop for it, to show off its possibilities and show that it doesn’t need to be ‘blocky’ in the way it’s designed, then please use The Gutenberg Site as a tool to help you.
If you’ve got feedback, or you just want to say “hey, that’s awesome” then we’d love to hear from you. Give us a shout on social media on Twitter or Instagram, or fire a quick email to [email protected].
We hope you enjoy!
