I was the design lead for the first phase of the project and continued to work on this project for a number of years during my time at Automattic. This was codenamed Gutenberg.
The problem: WordPress had outgrown it’s editor both in technology and experience.
This role saw many years of focus on the editor for me, resulting in co-leading a significant release of WordPress. I got to travel the world running usability tests, talking to contributors, iterating and listening. All whilst leading a growing team of full time and part time volunteer contributors both from Automattic, other companies and those with open source drive. It was an incredible experience focused on one very specific interface.
A new editor
The solution: create a new experience from the ground up, focusing on flow
WordPress had been a project around for a long time, it relied on a third party editor. The time had come to create it’s own heart, to build the start of a long road that is still being walked to site editing in the project.
This began with a paradigm shift, not only an interface change but a move from PHP to React. With this, a whole range of experience options also opened up.
5.0
With the launch of WordPress 5.0 the first release of the editor was live. However, this was just the start and I have continued to also work on this project in various capacities since then.
Talks
I spoke frequently over my time as design lead and continue to around Gutenberg. Here are some of those.