In September 2013, after years of light blogging with Jekyll via Octopress, I switched to a very sexy-looking new blogging platform called Ghost. Ghost was written with Node.JS and promised to be fast and efficient, with a minimalist writing interface and a slick looking dashboard.
I wrote up the platform in a quick article for Ars shortly after the public beta became available. The new and shiny had won me over, and I ditched Octopress and converted everything to Ghost.
But development took far longer than anyone anticipated. Essential blog features like post scheduling lagged; others, like customizable excerpts or the ability to center images without resorting to manual HTML and CSS entry still haven’t shown up. And that slick dashboard? Canceled.
No, Ars is very much still on the standard WP editor interface. The Ars WP instance has several custom fields and a a couple dozen custom shortcode tags for inserting various things into stories (like auto-generating of a table of contents for long pieces, fancy formatted pullquotes, customized iframes, customized galleries, integration with the Conde Nast ad network for programmatic ad selection by story or tag, and whatever the hell else is going on behind the scenes), and the tech team is being very cautious with integrating Gutenberg—lots of testing to do still.
Though the biggest obstacle, as with any major critical system change, is user retraining. Ars is like any office—there are some people who do well with IT changes, and some who appear to do all computing by rote memorization and who will be unable to function if even the slightest thing changes. Gutenberg represents not just an interface change, but a change in a lot of fundamental writing workflows—changing the writing interface metaphor to being more “block focused” or whatever they’re calling it requires adjustments to a lot of common tasks, especially around inserting and managing images.