For those of you that don’t know, Gutenberg is the project name for the re-imagining of the WordPress editorial experience.
Gutenberg is being developed in modern JavaScript, with tooling such as React and webpack.
In December 2016, we heard this idea of learning JavaScript deeply at WordCamp US.
WordPress is about democratizing publishing - there isn’t anything that says we have to continue to do that in PHP.
Developing with WordPress has become a bit of a predictable pattern. Working with custom post types and metaboxes is the same thing I have been doing for many years. Gutenberg will be a big change that breaks this pattern.
I’ve been dabbling in modern JavaScript and have even created my first custom Gutenberg block for embedding CodePen Pens. It’s open source and on GitHub at ataylorme/gutenberg-codepen-embed.
However, dabbling is not the same as writing modern JavaScript as part of a project for production site. Modern JavaScript is something WordPress developers will have to do for real projects.
What excites me the most about Gutenberg is that we have a compelling reason to learn JavaScript deeply.