Comment by josefresco | Hacker News Reader

Comment by josefresco | Hacker News Reader

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I "manage" about 175+ WordPress websites. Gutenberg came too late, so many clients were already using "visual builders" and therefore couldn't easily switch to Gutenberg. On every single other site that wasn't using a visual builder plugin, we disabled Gutenberg as initially it caused issues with the existing themes and plugins (CSS/JS conflicts etc.)

Time has passed, and it's now better but with so many WordPress sites "in the wild" it will take a lot of time for the majority to switch over.

The bigger issues recently are the changes within the WP core to how jQuery is handled (currently being phased in over 3 releases https://make.wordpress.org/support/2020/12/handling-potentia...).

The WordPress ecosystem is robust, wild and messy and it should stay that way IMHO.

In addition to sites using the existing visual builders that you cited, there are also people who really liked the classic editor:

I want a classic editor with no blocks. None. Not a block that ‘looks Classic’ for example. Just the old Classic editor. Is that possible?

https://wordpress.com/forums/topic/how-do-i-go-back-to-class...

Other discussions can be found here (https://www.google.com/search?q=wordpress+any+way+to+go+back...). Many writers like the simplicity of classic, others don't like the way Gutenberg "gets in the way" of what they are trying to do.

Of all the Wordress sites I help manage, some pre 'Gutenberg' and the rest post 'Gutenberg' only 2 are using Gutenberg, the rest have either stuck with or gone back to the Classic editor. For most users it's just too confusing.

I can confirm that I had several clients contact us confused about Gutenberg (heck I'm still confused). I still have clients confused about the extremely simple "Visual/Text" tabs, Gutenberg is 10x more complicated.

how do you manage so many? how do you manage all those websites, logins, admin rights, etc?

I've been a professional web dev for 20 years so just being organized is probably the #1 factor.

As far as specific tools, we use several to manage our client network, here are a few:

ManageWP

WordPress/Jetpack

WPEngine

We prefer clients host within our network, but also have 50+ that are hosted elsewhere.

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