 What you see is what you get. This is the dream of the web. This is the thing that everyone always wanted. I mean, I started working on the web many, many years ago, and back then, they were actually selling software that specifically said what you see is what you get. We had fireworks. We had Dreamweaver. We had Flash. We had front page. The idea was you would open an editor, and then you would place content in some sort of view, and then that content would appear in the same place in the exact same way in the web browser. It was a fantastic idea. Of course, it didn't actually work at all. But that's how it used to be. The reason why it was like that is because everyone wants that to happen. Everyone wants it to be that way, that we can just place content somewhere, and then everyone else will see the content in the same place. Today, we have things like Wix and Squarespace, which sell themselves the exact same way. They say, without actually using the words, what you see is what you get. We also have these new weird things happening. This is the grid. It's an application where you just dump content in, and some AI figures out how to display things in the right way. We have medium, and it's ilk, which are actually what you see is what you get, except they're just publishing straight up content. And then we have WordPress. And WordPress is an oddball, because in WordPress, we actually say we have what you see is what you get. But the person who comes to WordPress for the first time and goes to the back end and starts writing content, this is what they see. And this is what they get, which is what you see is what you get if what you see is the content and nothing else, and then not the header or the footer or the sidebar or any of the other content, provided the theme author and plugin developers also added in editor styles. So it's awesome. Now, the reason why I talk about this is because when WordPress was first developed, it pretty much everything we know about web design was happening. Everyone was working on these things. Remember those things? It was like you had a TV that sat on top of a big box, then you had a typewriter next to it, and then you had this big blocky thing that you can move around. Some people put it on the floor and thought it was a foot pedal. That is when the web was created. And that is actually how we still think about the web as this thing that everyone sees in a small little screen that's fixed. So we know what that screen is like. The problem is today, the landscape is totally different. Everyone walks around with one of those glass bars in their pocket, and all those glass bars have different sizes. People have laptops or tablets or tablets that turn into laptops or laptops who can split apart and fold. Soon they will actually have phones that can fold. And then in addition, there's these new things happening where they're shipping these bizarre looking glasses that people can put on their faces, and then they see something new. And this is highly relevant to us because that's where things are going. So today, I want you to do a thought experiment with me. I want you to take your imaginary VR goggles and put them on. Forget everything you know about WordPress. Forget everything you know about Gutenberg. And let's look at Gutenberg and the WordPress of tomorrow. If you have any complaints about this talk, please tweet me at Morton, that's my name. So I need to take you back to San Francisco, 2013. That was the, I believe the last time we had WordCamp San Francisco. The year after it became WordCamp US. And at every WordCamp San Francisco, now US, Matt Molloweg, does a talk called The State of the Word, where he talks about what has happened in WordPress and what will happen. At this particular event, at the very end of the talk, he brought up some really interesting slides. And he said, we're thinking about doing new things in WordPress. And one of the things that's come up is this idea of inline contextual editing of content. And another thing that we've been thinking about is providing types of content within the post. So rather than just writing paragraphs and headings and other stuff, you actually mark off what those things are. And then he showed this slide. This is courtesy of Joan Aspenson and Mel Choice. I believe Mel is in this building. I don't know if she's here. I can't see anyway, so hiding somewhere. 2013, all right? Now this concept has since become something people are used to on the web. If you go to Medium and you type out content, you have this little plus sign and you click on the plus sign and you get contextual features. If you go to LinkedIn Pulse, you have the same thing. You type in some content, you click this little icon and you get contextual features. And if you go to WordPress with Gutenberg, we now have the same thing. Except in WordPress it's not just small contextual little features. It is a whole ton of new features. They're all packaged into this entirely new way of editing everything that's going on inside the content editor. I'm gonna give you a short live demo because I've lost my mind. This is just a stock install of WordPress with running the current version, I hope. And this is with Gutenberg running. So I've written a small little post for you. It's just called what is Gutenberg anyway. And this is what Gutenberg looks like. So it is the content editor, but the content editor has a bunch of new features in it. For example, as you can see, this post has some subheadings and some other stuff going on. And there's a little info icon up here. You can open it and it tells me the word count. It tells me how many paragraphs I have. It even gives me a table of contents so I can see the structure of my document. So there's some new stuff going on here. But what's really important is what's happening inside the editor itself because each of these things that you see here are now considered blocks. So when I select a block, I see contextual information about that item. So here you can see this is currently just a paragraph. I can now change this to anything else. So I can change it to a quote. If I don't like the look of it, I can change it to a different kind of quote. If I don't like that, I can just go back and change it to a paragraph again. I can also change it to a heading and do a whole bunch of other stuff. But that's a block code. Nothing new here. So what if I want to add something else? Let's say I want to create a layout where I have two things next to one another. That used to be something you needed to plug in for. But if I go to blocks now, I can, where did you hide it? There you go, text columns. So I can set up a column here and another column over here. And then I realize, you know what? I actually need more columns than two. So in this, you're seeing something really new and unique in WordPress that wasn't there before. That is you can go into individual elements and start working on those elements as individual pieces. And those individual pieces have properties to them. And those properties can be controlled. And the properties change depending on what kind of content it is. So this is a three-column block. Now, if I go up to one of my paragraphs here, let's see, I'll go to this one. You'll see the block context over here on the right-hand side changes. And now I get things like text size. So I can change the text size of just that block. I get a background color option. I get a text color option. And even if I pick a really poorly chosen color here, you'll see, it even tells me that that's not the best option. And if I then add in something new, let's see, I want to add an image. I can also do that right here. I just say I want a new block. I want the block to be an image. Then I can upload or insert from media gallery. Here's an image of some old man. The context now tells me this is an image. I should probably have an alternative text on it. I can write a caption for it. And if I want to change it, I can then change the size of it. Let's see if it works. Yeah, it does. And then change its positioning until I get what I want. Then I click update and go to the front end. And here we have the post with my image, my three columns, my rear blue box. And this just shows you editing and WordPress changes in a fundamental way because you now have individualized control of all the little pieces. This is important because the main challenge of WSWIG, or what you see is what you get, was always that it's very hard to identify what the little things are inside any type of content. So what Gutenberg tries to do is identify all the pieces of content you put in to a post or eventually everything else in WordPress. And then give that item properties so that we can control it. This is totally new and totally different from how WordPress has worked before. And it all works based on blocks and block contexts. So I showed you a bunch of them. Here we have a paragraph block, which has a bunch of color options and other things. You have an image block that gives you the ability to add contextual information about the image. You have column blocks where you can choose how many columns you want and how they're laid out. We have heading blocks that give us heading control. We have block quote blocks that give us block quote control. We have image blocks and cover image blocks where you can superimpose text on top of images and even provide a background color on top of the image before the text. We have the read more block, which used to just be a line that says read more where you can now say read more and then you can choose whether or not the visitor actually sees the text before or not when they go to the single post. We have pull quote block, which just didn't use to be there. There's even new things like widgets that exist inside blocks. You can add them to posts and pages. And all of this happens in a rather interesting way. So behind the curtain, this is what it looks like. Might be a little hard to see. What's happening right now is when you create a block, you're actually putting little HTML comments inside the content that identify each of the blocks and then these little HTML comments will have properties assigned to them. So you can go in and look at the HTML comments. Now that's not to say you have to learn the language of this. In fact, if you go to an individual block inside the editor, you can click the little done error menu on the side and go and edit the output HTML that comes from it right inside your editor. So you can open just a block, just edit that HTML and then edit the rest of the content as if it was regular content. Sorry? Uncle Ernie will leave it alone. In theory. Now this of course brings up an obvious question. It brings up an obvious question, which is all the stuff lives inside the content block now. The answer is yes it does and we're just gonna ignore that. The more important thing is this opens up all these new opportunities for us because if we have the ability to set up blocks and set properties onto those blocks, we can start doing all sorts of crazy things that we could not do before and some companies are starting to explore this and figure out what they can do. So Yoast is looking at the possibility of adding contextual information to individual blocks and tell you whether or not they're good for SEO. That includes things like if you add an image Yoast's SEO plugin can tell you, hey you need to add an alternate text to this image otherwise it doesn't work properly. It means you can go in and tell you the readability of individual blocks because you have contextual control. They're looking at adding our SEO and readability feedback as comments inside text. Basically someone can look at it and add additional information. And all this is made possible because we are now working on individual block elements. Matthias, who's one of the people who are working on this project, wrote a post called Gutenberg and the Ship of Theseus where he said, imagine defining a whole page template as a set of default blocks ready to be filled once they use a creative page. This is also important because I think anyone who's built a site knows that you build a site and go, this is the type of content that needs to go on the site for it to look good and they hand it over to the client and then they do something totally different. And then they call you and they go, it looks like crap. And you're like, yeah, well you didn't do anything I told you to do so it looks like crap, right? But if you can provide them with an actual rigid template and say, no, you fill in this template and then it'll look exactly the way we wanted to, well you can because you can feed in a template of blocks to WordPress and say, here's the template, you just fill in the blocks as I've set them up and then everything will look okay. He also said, Gutenberg aims to give developers a way to define and protect structural markup and their design while giving users the ability to directly edit the information intuitively. So in English terms, it means US developer or designer should be able to figure out how things should be laid out and then still give the end user control over the individual content that goes inside there. So for example, if you want to have a layout where you have these three buckets where each of them has an image and then some text underneath, you can provide that as a template so that people can add the three bucket blog block and then they can just fill in the content automatically and you can even make it so that they can save unless they've done it properly because you can add contextual information and you can style individual blocks, both the ones that ship and the ones that can come in. You can, sorry, Gutenberg grants block control to developers so developer can say, I know how paragraph blocks are styled from WordPress, I don't like that so I'm gonna change it to something else. That's something you can now do as a theme developer and it'll follow with the theme or the plugin you're using. But the really cool thing is, themes and plugins can introduce new blocks. So one of the examples is WooCommerce. They were experimented with what they, I forget what they call it, it's something weird like WooBlocks, something like that, where products and product displays are blocks that you can place anywhere. I have a random idea. I know a comic book artist who really likes to publish comments and she's always complaining about how it's hard to lay out comments. So you can make a comic book block where you can create different types of block layouts. That thing can get loaded in, they just select the layout and then apply the images they want inside that layout. Lay it out exactly, you want this? Okay, it just CSS grid, it'll take like five lines of code. I don't know about the actual JavaScript, but the CSS part of it is super easy. You can create a layout selector so when a user goes in to create a new post, they can pick which layout they're going to work on and then supply that layout. This is something that other companies are doing already. A human made made this really complex layout selected for a newspaper they were working on. This is now possible inside Gutenberg. They're also working on this concept of repeatable blocks where you add a piece of content in one post or one page and you go, actually I need to use that somewhere else. So if you write an article about Kafka and this metamorphosis and you go, I might mention Kafka's bio some other place, you can make it a repeatable block and then say, oh, here's another page and we're just gonna add it there as well and also on this other page and if you edit any one of them, it'll edit in all the other places too. So if you were selling a book, you just make the one repeatable block in one place, place it wherever you want anywhere else on the site. Now, this begs an obvious question. If Gutenberg is an editor replacement, this makes no sense. Why would you have repeatable blocks inside the editor? Well, the reality is Gutenberg was never an editor replacement. I'll repeat that. Gutenberg was never an editor replacement. Gutenberg is more like WordPress trying to become actual with the wig. So right now, this is what you see. This is what Gutenberg looks like, an actual editor replacement and that's because the way that we've been designing websites is something like this. You have a header, you have some sort of nav thing, you have a big content blob, you have a sidebar, you have a footer or some sort of layout like that and right now, Gutenberg sits in the content blob but that's just because we're used to doing things that way and the reason why the Gutenberg team is working only inside the content editor is simply because that's the logical place to start. That is not where it ends. This way of doing things is soon going to go away. What we'll end up with is something altogether different. See, Gutenberg is greedy, he wants to take over the whole view. Not just the content but everything. So what we have right now is this concept of blocks that you place inside the content editor. You can combine them in any way you want but the next step is for those blocks to go beyond just the editor to everywhere. I think the next step in the process is the customizer and logically in the customizer you would think there you can customize a lot of things like all the digitized areas and the header and the footer and all these other things but the thing is, remember how I said the world is changing and people put glasses on? This concept of viewport is going away and these blocks should be able to live anywhere. Now if everything is a block, a lot of things change. So if you look at the list of things that they're currently working on, you'll see there's a lot of things that are becoming blocks. This is the current potential blocks list. So caveat, maybe none of this happens but we have recent comments, tag, cloud, search, author, bio, slideshow, logo, social links, cover video, open graph link, latest polls, custom menu. All these things can be blocks and in addition you'll have all the plugin things and all the theme things that people will introduce. So imagine you're writing a post and you go, hey, I actually need to provide a link to the recent posts, to recent comments. You can just dump that in this block or you're working on an entire view and you said it would be relevant here to provide a link to the most recent comments. I'm just gonna dump that into the sidebar or you say on this particular view I want a nice looking list of the posts at the top or in the middle or on the bottom or you say I really need a chat somewhere. So I'm gonna put a chat in the footer or a slideshow that needs to go in the header for some reason. You can place these blocks anywhere you want but you have to start thinking beyond just this little viewport. You see the web up until this point has been confined to some sort of rectangular screen but that is not how it's going to be and Gutenberg has the potential of moving us into the next time when we go beyond that because we're in this weird situation now where we're designing everything based on the very old methodology and within this old methodology Gutenberg fits well inside the content editor. The next step is to move Gutenberg inside the whole view and then to let Gutenberg take over everything. And I know that people like the Gutenberg team was like so caveat, we're not doing any VR stuff right now. There's zero VR plans. Oh, there are. There are pull requests on VR. That's awesome. Pull requests, welcome. Yes, go right the map towards. This is actually what you see is what you get is all about. It's this idea of creating a block and placing it wherever you want it to appear and then have other people experience it where they want it to appear. Now you have to think about what you see is what you get. A little bit different from how we've done it so far because in our heads, what you see is what you get is this thing that happens where I look at a screen and then I make something and then I expose that to someone else. In the future, what you see is what you get is something that the user will say. So they will go in and say, I want all the logos for all the sites I go to to be up here in this space and I want all the menus to be up over here so I know where they are in my VR space or something like that. And Gutenberg allows us to do that. Which brings us back to this what you see is what you get thing and what I want you to do right now. So what you see is what you get only works if we all start contributing. It's not what you see is what you get. It's what you test is what you get. It's not what you see is what you get is what you contribute is what you get. It's not what you see is what you get. It's what you build is what you get. And every single person in this room has the knowledge and the ability to test, contribute, and build. Even if you've never touched WordPress before and you just happen to go to WordCamp US as your first ever WordPress experience, in which case, I welcome you. You are the most important person in this room. You can contribute either today or probably not today, tomorrow, or on Sunday. You can go test Gutenberg with one of the Gutenberg team and provide feedback. Or you can download Gutenberg, install it as a plugin, start testing it, and then file tickets on the GitHub repo and provide your feedback to the team. That includes your VR tickets. So, test Gutenberg today, contribute your ideas, and build the future you want with Gutenberg. And of course, make it accessible. Thank you very much. So we have time for some questions. We've got microphones in the two aisles here. Do we have anybody? I know we're all anxious to get to dinner. Lock the doors. I have five minutes left, okay. So I've been thinking a lot about the consequences of tying content more closely to presentation and how it might actually have the opposite effect of what you're suggesting that, as the viewport no longer becomes the viewport you've known as a rectangular screen becomes something much more. When you tie content to presentation so closely, you lose that abstraction of content and presentations, the separation of the two that has become a lot more important over the last decade or so as we stress content first. Do you have similar concerns, or do you see where the direction of content first strategy is going? Is it going to change the content presentation happening simultaneously? Recent technological advances has allowed us to start writing proper HTML and ship proper semantic HTML to your browser and then allow the browser to figure out how to display that content. Things like Flexbox and CSS and all those other fancy stuff, right? The end result of that is once WebVR comes online and that's what we're all gonna be doing. I know you're all like, why is he talking about VR? I'm telling you in five years you're all gonna be making VR experiences. Doesn't matter. The point is, right today, we can write semantic HTML that's structured properly and then have the browser render that content the way we want to. Now, in the utopian dream of Gutenberg actually finishing and taking over the entire view, you can imagine a theme could actually just be CSS. That styles individual blocks and then probably provide some sort of grid layout for how these blocks appear. And that also means if a user comes to the site and decides to override the layout, the theme can still supply styling for the individual blocks and then the user can then choose to override the styling of the individual blocks and get at just the content, right? So this opens the door for us to actually provide structured semantic content to a user in an accessible way and then allow them to choose. Do I want to look at it the way the original designer or creator wanted it? Or do I want to look at it the way I want to look at it? And this idea of having control of the properties of each individual block gives us that opportunity. Of course, this all is predicated on the notion that the data inside WordPress is structured in such a way that you can send a request and say, I only want this one block out of the post, right, we're not there yet. I, so far I've been saying things that are very neutral. In my opinion, that is the priority that needs to happen is actually splitting up the data in such a way that you can query individual pieces of data. I'm not sure how to do that, but that's something that needs to happen. And in that scenario, we'd be able to do a lot of that and it would remedy your concern. Thank you. So there's a lot of history and WordPress of other front-end editing-type WYSIWYG pieces. Also across the entire ecosystem technology, people have been making WYSIWYG experiences and desktop publishing for years. And people, of course, you mentioned FrontPage and similar platforms. It seems like if this was a problem ecosystem-wide, if we really wanted to create something it would give us immediately something like this, it would have happened before. So. No, we didn't have the technology. The browser didn't have the technology. Do you think? So here's my question. Between what we've seen happen thus far, do we have enough mindset to understand what we need to get to this VR space, this new structured data space, this new deeper space? Or is this a concept that's hard to grasp? We have the mindset to do it. The big challenge WordPress faces is always backwards compatibility. Now, Gutenberg is this fundamental change to how WordPress operates. And I'm of mind that at some point we might have to draw a line and say everything before is WordPress classic and everything after is something else and allow people to choose to once the old experience or the new experience. Now, of course, I say this and then everyone is like, hold on one second, we don't do that. But we might have to because the APIification of the web is built around this notion that you should be able to query any little piece of data you want out and then do something with it. WordPress is predicated on the concept of putting everything in one little data blob and then go and query content from inside that blob, which is really heavy handed. And I think WordPress needs to move beyond that way of handling data as a whole. And Gutenberg gives us the opportunity to do that. Whether or not that's actually gonna happen is a whole different story because it depends on every one of us providing input and figuring out like, how do we do this moving forward? But the mindset of moving us forward is definitely there because like I said, this concept is many years old. It just took time for technology to catch up with the idea. This was forward thinking in 2013. We're just now at a point where we can actually do it. And the people who are working on Gutenberg are some of the smartest people we have in the community and they're working extremely hard and they're taking feedback and they're moving the needle constantly to make it better. And that means if every single one of the people that's in the room today and every single one of you watching at home, including my wife, if you all go and test this and provide feedback, the team will have data to work with and be able to address these issues. It's very hard to work in a vacuum. So let's fill the vacuum. Yeah, this is a follow up on a data question. Is Gutenberg planning to provide a front-end API to allow plugin developers to query and modify that data directly from the blocks or is that something that you guys are not thinking about? And there's a second part to that is what are your thoughts around doing kind of real-time collaboration, vis-a-vis Google Docs-style collaboration around the content blocks? Is that are you guys moving in that direction as well? So second part of that question, that collaboration within the WordPress editor kind of already exists through some plugins and I can't imagine Gutenberg not helping with that. And what Yost is looking at is kind of something along those lines that could be extended. So it's a possibility. And I think that's something that would be great as a plugin as for the API. I know that there are things being built in to allow plugin and theme developers to hook into any feature that's there. So my assumption is something like that would exist. Best place to find out is to write a ticket on the GitHub repo and ask the question. Now I should also point out I'm not actually part of the Gutenberg team. So I'm not speaking on behalf of the people who build this. They are smarter than me. So that's where we are. Is that satisfactory? Okay, yes. Hey, Martin. Hey. Thank you so much for the presentation and I'm just personally so excited to see how much progress Gutenberg has made in the last three months. It looks really cool now and like three or four months ago. To me it didn't. I just wanna advocate for actual column layouts that aren't just text columns but actual sort of block layouts that people can put whatever in an image, a video. And especially if the Gutenberg team ends up forking WordPress with all the like kind of chaos that that would create, you might as well put Gutenberg like as a front-end editor like all a square space, which I know is a huge, like may not be possible without forking WordPress but if you're gonna do it, I have a strong feeling that that really, to me it matters hugely whether I'm editing off to the side and seeing my changes versus if I'm editing what looks like a webpage and I click save and that's what the webpage looks like. So those are just some things I think matter and I'm curious what you think. So front-end editing has always been a really big ask in WordPress. Everyone wants front-end editing and there's a bunch of plugins that try to do it and it hasn't really worked very well for a myriad of reasons about- Arguably Beaver Builder and Elementor are decent. Yeah, so I'll get to that. Okay. So front-end editing in WordPress is possible now but it's a little clunky just because of the architecture of WordPress. I think that the Gutenberg fully completed in the vision of taking over the entire view would open the door to actual proper front-end editing. However, it adds this additional layer of you need to be able to switch between content context and block context, right? So you're either doing layout and moving blocks around and dealing with the properties of a block or you're dealing with the actual content, right? And there's a very interesting, there's a lot of work that needs to be done in explaining to people what these two different context layers are and when you're working in which one and what you can do there. So what I'm imagining is likely to happen. Any front-end layout builder plugin people in the room right now, some people are worried that Gutenberg is a page builder killer. I actually think it's the opposite. I think Gutenberg opens the door to page builders to be able to do completely new and really revolutionary things. I like to think big. So imagine this. So Gutenberg exists and allows you to build blocks, right? And you install a bunch of plugins that allow you to add additional blocks. And then you go, I want this to be laid out in a certain way, but I can't find the theme that lays it out the way I want. So you install a page builder plugin that allows you to pull in guides the way you would do in Photoshop and then make a grid and then just drag and drop blocks into the grid wherever you want it and then make it responsive or whatever you want and then save those and then go a step further and say, actually I like this particular layout. So I'm gonna save that as a template and then the next time I make a new piece of content I can then pull from any one of these templates and pull them in. That's what page builders will be able to do which they can't functionally do now and they'll be able to do it sitting on top of core WordPress without doing a whole bunch of crazy stuff in the process because the blocks are ready and able to be managed in any way you want. And then the page builders can come in and allow people to do this in a new and dynamic way. And that's where we will stand apart from Wix and Squarespace and all this other stuff because that means at the core WordPress Outputs accessible semantic content then the page builder sits on top of it and allows us to lay that content out in whatever way the user wants. He was there before. Oh, okay. Just as a follow up to that that almost leads more into the concept of a Guten theme where instead of using Gutenberg to create the content you're creating the entire page layout where the header is a block, the menu is a block then you have two columns and one is the content is a block, the sidebar is a block. I wasn't, was curious as to your thoughts on whether it would be interesting or feasible or a horrible, horrible idea to see if that's even possible to get is 2018 the new default theme. Oh. I look gay, yeah. Short answer now. Yeah, I think we as a community actually need to start thinking about what we want this to be, right? Because right now up until this point whenever I talk to people about Gutenberg I hear one of two things either I'm not, I don't understand it so I tried it two months ago five months ago or whatever and I couldn't figure it out so I've just stopped looking at it or they're saying I'm very concerned about how this is changing something for my clients or changing something for me or changing something for someone else. I rarely hear people say this is a tremendous opportunity I should start inputting content. And when I read, like Yoast's team is actually doing work on figuring out how can we do things with this, right? The WooCommerce team is looking at how can we do things with it? How can we make this into something new and better? Everyone always asks about how do we really evolve WordPress into something new? Well, this is that opportunity right here right now. This is the we are evolving WordPress into something new. So here's your chance to actually input content to write blog posts, draw terrible drawings and say like I want this thing to happen and then propose how to make that work. That's the only way this moves forward. How do you think Gutenberg came about? There was a bunch of people that sat and drew bad drawings and said I want this to happen and then eventually people start working on it and then it just happened. This is open source, this is how everything happens. You can all do this. I feel like I'm repeating myself. I know I'm repeating myself. But this is truly our opportunity as a community to evolve WordPress into a modern publishing application that looks like nothing else on the web. And when Matt was talking about a moonshot and leapfrogging WordPress and everything everyone was like eh eh eh whatever. It's actually accurate. This is something we can do. We can leapfrog WordPress forward. This is our moonshot. Units contribute to it. Make it happen. Okay, I spent a lot of time trying to get people to not care at all about what their stuff looks like in the editor and really just worry about the structure. Particularly for WordPress as a CMS where we're talking about things like recipes and products that have really specific structures that are important. It seems that this is very focused on the front end presentation of the website itself but more and more things like instant articles, Google AMP, it's very important that your content has a structure so that these other distribution outlets will work and you don't have to do all sorts of things to make them work. How does this work, how will this still support all those things that are important? That's the magic of it. Exactly what you're saying. Because we now have property control of individual blocks, you can make a recipe block and you can say in a recipe block there is an image, a name, a time field, a list of items, each little list of items has things in it and you can provide all that information as a template and then you as a developer can control that HTML output and make sure it's as semantic as you want and as accessible as you want everything else and then someone else can come in and just apply some styling to it or not and anything you hook it into will then be able to pull that data out and they get your nice clean semantic data and then use it in any way you want. So if you build your recipe thing and then you want to repeat it somewhere else you just do. If you want to build the recipe thing and then you want to share it on Facebook you can just pull the data out and display it on Facebook the way you want to. So it opens the door to fully separate presentation from content at block level which is something we couldn't do before. Because right now you can do that but with the content block as a whole. And if you add something into it you have to stash it somewhere else. This opens the door for full control over all the elements. Okay, that's what we're gonna do. Thanks. It looks like it's about visualization it's actually about data. I feel like my answer was not satisfying to me. I have like two minutes so let's do two questions. Yes. Hi, I know I'm being overly simplistic here but what Gutenberg refers to as blocks page builders have been calling sections rows and modules for years now. And around that third party communities have been built up where we create custom modules and things like that for these page builders. Will WordPress be moving towards encouraging people to create third party modules for Gutenberg? And if so will they be added as plugins or will there be another interface for creating just modules that can be uploaded and shared? So yes, plugin developers who are currently making custom modules or custom fields or whatever should be focusing on making them into blocks because then it'll work with core WordPress, right? So it'll behave the same way you wanna add a whole new framework on top of it. I think hopefully what will happen is once this is properly solidified and works plugin developers will just naturally build it on top of it because it's easier don't need to provide an entire JavaScript framework just to handle the display of it and everything but there's still room for making custom things inside Gutenberg because it's still just JavaScript and HTML and CSS and you can jam extra stuff in there. It wouldn't be very smart but could. So there will be a transition period I think where a lot of the people that are currently building custom solutions will have to figure out how to transition those custom solutions into gluten blocks or whatever they're called and then whether or not they should or what they are and this is the opportunity for people who are building custom solutions to figure out maybe we should re-engineer this like this gives the opportunity to rethink everything in the context of how WordPress itself works. I mean we have a historical precedence for this in the customizer. So when the customizer first came out a lot of themes would ship essentially a customizer and then there was a lot of resistance to this new customizer because the new customizer comes in addition to the customizer that's inside the theme and then over time theme developers started going hey I don't need to add all this extra custom stuff because it's already sitting in WordPress itself so they migrated their new custom features into the customizer and then what you sometimes see is if enough themes incorporate a specific type of functionality into the customizer WordPress will just adopt that functionality and then you can take it out of your theme and you can see probably the same thing will happen with blocks enough theme developers build a certain specific kind of block and likely migrate into WordPress core and then you can take away your customization and just let it, let core run its own course. Okay one more question. Hey I was just wondering like if the ultimate goal of Gutenberg is to turn everything into a block and not just have content blocks in the back end post-editor will there ever be a point where the back end post-editor is replaced and if so how will that affect like headless CMS? That's a great question. My crystal ball is full of fog. Yeah, I think one Gutenberg is fully implemented. The way that we're currently thinking about the back end and front end of WordPress will change dramatically. I mean just imagine all the features and settings moving around and doing different things. So it's really hard to answer because it depends on how the application itself evolves. And it also depends on how we choose to work with it. I think end goal would probably be something like a front end editor functionality or basically you might be on the back end but there's no discernible difference because you're working on these individual blocks but at the same time I also think it will be necessary to create some sort of system where you can go in and edit a bunch of blocks and then later place them. Right? Because eventually the placement and display of blocks will get divorced from the blocks themselves and we'll start treating individual blocks as things that get sucked up by a client and displayed somewhere. So the framework idea of Gutenberg lends itself very well to headless CMS because you can now work with individual blocks. How exactly that will happen is open for debate. Yeah, like I'm just thinking about in place editing. Yeah? Well, what does your crystal ball say? I don't know. All right. Thank you very much for the time you gave me. Big thanks to Morton.