CUNY Academic Commons

Gutenberg added in https://github.com/cuny-academic-commons/cac/commit/9fde021781b274ae552621b72190e31dbfabbec9
WP 4.9.8 in https://github.com/cuny-academic-commons/cac/commit/982c13deaa3be932aacc1aa893f1c2154bbf9497
Callout disabled in https://github.com/cuny-academic-commons/cac/commit/972230f54bf9b6606183a0b48e21dfcf03117002

I'm going to leave this open against 1.13.8 so that we can finalize whether to turn Try Gutenberg on.

Bumping this so that we can continue to consider the callout.

Bumping again. Let's talk about this in the context of our fall release. Copying Steve so it can be added to our list of things to discuss.

Sonja Leix wrote:

Thanks Boone! What's the plan for the Commons and Gutenberg? Is it Gutenberg ready? Is that a project for 1.15 to convert the site to be Gutenberg compatible?

There's no plan. That's what this ticket is about :)

It's hard to define what "Gutenberg compatible" would mean. A site could run a plugin that doesn't play nicely with Gutenberg, but the owner might never notice it. With so many plugins on the Commons, it's very hard to see how we'd be, in any sense, fully ready.

As a starting place, I ran a few scripts that combine the following bits of data:
- The Gutenberg Plugin Compatibility database https://plugincompat.danielbachhuber.com/
- Plugin usage stats on the Commons - see #10034

See attached csv files. The second column is the "compatibility" column from the Gutenberg database, and the last column is the install count for Commons sites. results.csv is raw results, while results-filtered.csv has been edited to remove plugins known to be compatible, and sorted by compat status + install counts.

From this latter spreadsheet, and filtering what I know about the way Gutenberg interfaces with the what the plugins do, it looks like the biggest points of concern are:
- jetpack - but I'm sure their team will take care of things, so not really an issue
- page-links-to
- pdf-embedder
- youtube-embed-plus
- wpgform
- add-category-to-pages
- embed-google-map
- media-element-html5-video-and-audio-player
- easyrotator-for-wordpress

The first four are listed as "not working", while the others are unknown. Most other items on the list are used on fewer than 20 Commons sites, and so perhaps should be deemphasized.

It's also worth noting that, as far as I can see, none of these plugins are "incompatible" in the sense that they'll, say, crash the site. They just may have incomplete integration with Gutenberg. So the main risk is user confusion, since the Classic Editor may need to be used in those cases while the plugins play catch-up.

Given this, my gut feeling is that the risk of incompatibility is not great. The larger hurdle is likely to be user education and confusion. To me, this is an argument in favor of allowing WordPress to show its 'Try Gutenberg' callout to site admins, so that they can choose to begin testing and onboarding themselves. We can then work on any necessary documentation changes in advance of the WordPress 5.0 release, which will enable the Gutenberg interface by default (currently sorta scheduled for November, but IMO much more likely to come out in January or February).

Thanks, all. I'm going to go ahead and allow the callout for the 1.13.11 release. Let's open separate tickets for specific issues that may result. https://github.com/cuny-academic-commons/cac/commit/b22c55e51252e5e1cbb149cb76cec77ce5de7035