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I appreciate that the question in the title may be a little bit vague. So far, my understanding of Gutenberg's longer term implications are:

i) WordPress will ultimately evolve into an entire front-end website assembly tool (similar to Wix).

ii) Blocks will will represent the core elements of future website assembly.

So my question is, what ultimately will be the impact on the concept of the WordPress loop? Are we likely to see Posts/Pages continuing as a kind of master block, with all other block types (what were previously widgets, shortcodes, advanced custom fields etc) then somehow embedded or tied to these master blocks (i.e. the WordPress loop?).

Or will, for example, each block type be associated with its own loop (e.g. called from the class loop with a new parameter specified within the traditional loop?).

I'm just struggling to understand the impact of Gutenberg on WordPress development over the short and medium terms.

The answer may be "no-one knows precisely at this point" but, then again, I suspect that there are already some indications about where this is going and if anyone is aware of what impact we can expect for developers, I would be keen to hear your thoughts.

Thanks,

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There is no impact on the loop in the current iteration. Gutenberg created content is just stored as HTML inside the post_content column of the database, and output with the_content(). Same as before.

As for site-customisation, you said it: No-one knows precisely at this point.

There are no technical details on how site-customisation will work exactly, or how developers will interact with it, at this stage. That's the next phase of the project, so once the editor is merged, keep following the project to learn how it will be implemented, and possibly even influence its development.

Mel Choyce gave a talk in February which showed some early ideas for how customisation might work from the user perspective, but all we know technically at this stage is that the sorts of elements that will be used will be Gutenberg blocks.

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  • Thank you very much for your insight. I'm also wondering if future iterations will maintain backwards compatibility with pre-Gutenberg versions, but I guess that's up in the air too. Commented Oct 29, 2018 at 6:15
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See this video of Morten Rand-Hendriksen: Gutenberg and the WordPress of Tomorrow to get more idea of how future might look like for WordPress.

Short term - Most developers'(including myself) will wait for the Gutenberg to get merged into core. After some time has passed, when Gutenberg has "stabilized" a bit. Developers' will make sure their product will integrate well into Gutenberg. Slowly people will convert to block but most devs will be reluctant. It used to be easy for anyone to be a WP dev. Knowing HTML/CSS and sprinkles of PHP and WordPress tags were enough to create a theme/plugin.

Devs need to update their knowledge on JS(es6),React and Redux to make complex blocks. If you are not well versed with JS you will fall behind. If you are technically sound on these platforms. New opportunities will be coming to you.

Long terms - Once Phase 2 of has been implemented. WordPress will be ushered into website building domain. Previously, devs need to hack WP to make their own user on-boarding process into their products. Everyone(that includes themeforest products) will also adopt Gutenberg way of theme/site on-boarding process. If Gutenberg Cloud gets popular more and more devs will flock into Gutenberg way of doing things.

Undoubtedly, Gutenberg setup environment process is complicated. But, the thing is the whole web development environment setup got complicated in general. Gutenberg is adopting the current trends.

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