Etch-a-Sketching Out the Future

Love him or hate him, Kevin Geary knows how to stir conversation. We’ve had a few public and private disagreements, and his fanboys often tag me as some sort of anti-Kevin Gutenberg apologist. So when Kevin revealed this image during his top secret Etch pre-sale campaign, I was not surprised by all the DMs asking me what the hell was going on.

Before I continue, quick housekeeping. Last week Matt Medeiros and I sat down to record a bit of a “WordPress project 101”. We cover topics like open source, dot-com vs dot-org, Jetpack, Woocommerce, GPL, and even give our full take on Automattic and Matt Mullenweg himself. It was informative and honest. Watch it here.

So what is my relationship to Etch? To be clear, I’m not paying or getting paid by Kevin. I’m not doing paid affiliate marketing in any way (I don’t want to and don’t have the audience size if I did). In fact, I really don’t care whether you buy into the pre-sale or not. Kevin’s a great marketer, so I’ll let him worry about that part.

More than a month ago, Kevin reached out and asked if I’d be willing to hear about his new project, Etch, and possibly serve on its advisory board, which is not an uncommon thing for software companies. Kevin and I go back and forth on a lot of topics, but there’s a few things we generally agree on:

• People building websites for money need to know their fundamentals and create quality work.
• The block editor is not currently a viable replacement for page builders like Bricks or Elementor.

Kevin gave me the full Etch pitch. It was pretty close to what you saw if you went to the pre-sale events, but he focused on a few key areas, Gutenberg integration being one of them. If you thought the slide showing my face was shocking, you should’ve seen the live chat when Kevin announced Gutenberg integration.

What got my attention, though, was the idea of a page builder that was meant for developers, generating clean, standards-based code, and storing it in a format that was completely compatible with where WordPress core was headed.

Kevin has referred to Etch as a “data liberation” project, riffing on the official WordPress project that aims to combat the lock-in that happens with proprietary tools and page builders. You’d build the designs and layouts in Etch, he explained, but the content management could still happen inside of Gutenberg if you wanted.

What’s important to me is that WordPress as an open source platform for publishing content on the web survives and thrives. That it actually does successfully reach its potential as being powerful enough for developers and yet simple enough for non-technical content creators. And I think a big part of that is for website builders at the freelancer and agency level creating websites that store content in a way that’s as close to core as possible.

In a recent interview on The WP Minute with Matt Medieros, Kevin mentioned his idea of the ‘middle America’ developer:

I think if you look at maybe Matt’s [Mullenweg] connections and what Matt prioritizes it’s Enterprise level stuff and so that’s yet again out of touch with the the I call it the Middle America of WordPress, right, like that that agency freelancer. It’s not doing Enterprise projects. They’re building websites for small businesses, medium-sized businesses, and they don’t use the Enterprise level workflows and ideas. And they need things to be efficient. They still want their sites to be professional. They still want them to be scalable and maintainable, but they don’t want to dig into code all the time. They don’t want to code everything custom from scratch because their clients aren’t paying Enterprise-level money. So that’s the user that feels like “man I can’t really use the block editor.”

This idea resonates with me, especially since I wrote about exactly this concept in 2022 on The WP Minute: “Where Will The WordPress Middle Class Go?”:

In my mind, this “middle class” includes developers who like to build their front-end with custom HTML and CSS, but don’t have the time or budget to become React ninjas for every project. The middle class developer can feel constrained by page builders but overwhelmed by complicated build processes. The middle class developer probably relies on tools like ACF, Pods, or CPT UI to build sites that need to be updated regularly by non-technical clients. 

At the end of the day, we both want the same thing- WordPress to become a design and development tool that’s more visual and modern than “classic” era WordPress, but doesn’t require you to build the actual tooling in React while you’re doing it.

I should not have to extend the block editor itself with React components and a build process just to achieve common designs and layouts in my site’s content. I don’t mind doing my work in VSCode, changing values in theme.json or adding a few PHP functions and filters. But most website builders should not need to know React to build a website in WordPress (though plugin developers most certainly should).

I’m still bullish on Gutenberg eventually ticking all the basic boxes for developers. I think it’s getting there. But I also believe that WordPress is great because you can build an Elementor, an ACF, and yes an Etch on top of it. I like the idea of healthy competition, of choice in development tools, and of a rising tide that lifts all boats- and lifts the quality of code on every WordPress website.

So will Kevin actually pull this off? The roadmap is exhaustive, the technical challenges huge, the stage very public. Kevin’s talked a big game the last year, criticizing the Gutenberg project’s ability to build a compelling user interface for developers. He’s now going to have to back all that talk up with a real product and prove he can do it better. He does have the advantage of only having to build for new sites, not the existing 43% of the web. And he has a much smaller target audience that he’s trying to please.

He’s drawn a lot of attention by being critical, and now it’s time to see if he can pull off the creation of something. I agreed to advise the project because I want to see it succeed, and I want to see it generate a more positive feedback loop between the page builder community and Gutenberg. And maybe even lead to contributions and improvements in WordPress core.

He’s sketched out a three-year roadmap for Etch. Gutenberg is on year seven of its initial ten year trajectory. You see where this is going? 2027 could make for an interesting year.