Gutenberg on Mobile

The mobile team has been looking at GutenbergGutenberg The Gutenberg project is the new Editor Interface for WordPress. The editor improves the process and experience of creating new content, making writing rich content much simpler. It uses ‘blocks’ to add richness rather than shortcodes, custom HTML etc. https://wordpress.org/gutenberg/ lately, and while it’s too soon to have a detailed plan, we thought we’d share an update on where we stand so far.

We want to support Gutenberg on the mobile apps. And for Gutenberg to be successful in the apps, we believe we must strive to support the full experience, and not a limited feature set. We believe Gutenberg and the concept of blocks has the potential to reshape the way people customize and extend WordPress, and the apps should be a coreCore Core is the set of software required to run WordPress. The Core Development Team builds WordPress. part of that experience. Getting this right opens up a level of extensibility on mobile that we have never been able to support with the existing pluginPlugin A plugin is a piece of software containing a group of functions that can be added to a WordPress website. They can extend functionality or add new features to your WordPress websites. WordPress plugins are written in the PHP programming language and integrate seamlessly with WordPress. These can be free in the WordPress.org Plugin Directory https://wordpress.org/plugins/ or can be cost-based plugin from a third-party infrastructure.

To make this a reality, we have been experimenting with ReactReact React is a JavaScript library that makes it easy to reason about, construct, and maintain stateless and stateful user interfaces. https://reactjs.org/. Native the past weeks, and we keep doing research on what we’re going to need to build this. Our plan is to adapt Gutenberg to make its primitives run both on web and native platforms, then have some platform-specific components, like Aztec for RichText, or our own Media pickers.

We are still in the process of discovering what changes will be necessary, but so far we know that:

  • Blocks will have to rely on a given set of known primitives that are implemented in all platforms if they are to be mobile compatible, instead of using plain HTMLHTML HTML is an acronym for Hyper Text Markup Language. It is a markup language that is used in the development of web pages and websites..
  • We need to find a solution for styling. CSSCSS CSS is an acronym for cascading style sheets. This is what controls the design or look and feel of a site. is a given on the web, but not on mobile.
  • Blocks should not access the DOM directly, since React Native doesn’t use the DOM. There might be other JavaScriptJavaScript JavaScript or JS is an object-oriented computer programming language commonly used to create interactive effects within web browsers. WordPress makes extensive use of JS for a better user experience. While PHP is executed on the server, JS executes within a user’s browser. https://www.javascript.com/. limitations.

Beyond technical limitations, Gutenberg and blockBlock Block is the abstract term used to describe units of markup that, composed together, form the content or layout of a webpage using the WordPress editor. The idea combines concepts of what in the past may have achieved with shortcodes, custom HTML, and embed discovery into a single consistent API and user experience. developers will have to consider that their UIUI UI is an acronym for User Interface - the layout of the page the user interacts with. Think ‘how are they doing that’ and less about what they are doing. will run on different platforms and screen sizes, and use a design that works across all of them. We’ll hopefully provide a tool set to help block developers make their blocks mobile compatible.

There are still a lot of unknowns, but we are very excited about this project, and its potential to bring the apps closer to core and allow for much more customization than is possible today.

You can expect to see some discussion happening on the Gutenberg and gutenberg-mobile GithubGitHub GitHub is a website that offers online implementation of git repositories that can easily be shared, copied and modified by other developers. Public repositories are free to host, private repositories require a paid subscription. GitHub introduced the concept of the ‘pull request’ where code changes done in branches by contributors can be reviewed and discussed before being merged be the repository owner. https://github.com/ repos, and we’ll make another post here once we have a clearer roadmap. If you have any questions or want to get involved, you can discuss here or find us in the #core-editor and #mobile rooms in WordPress.org Slack.