Gutenberg & the building blocks of an online presence.

The following is a guest post on behalf of our sponsors at GoDaddy. GoDaddy Pro provides free tools like delegated account access and a single dashboard to manage all your WordPress sites (no matter where they’re hosted).

Let’s go back in time to 2004 when WordPress was first spun out of b2/cafelog.

In these early days, a website was your online presence.

Social media wasn’t really a thing yet. Facebook wasn’t conceived until a month after WordPress 1.0 shipped, MySpace didn’t take off until 2005, and Twitter came along a year later in 2006.

Nobody was vlogging on YouTube or streaming on Twitch or posting stories to Instagram because these things didn’t exist yet.

But blogs existed, and the web was full of them. They were tomes of digital text, powered by a plethora of platforms.

In time, WordPress came to dominate. It gobbled up market share as bloggers moved away from the likes of Movable Type (and others).

WordPress was great because it provided an elegant writing experience and was open to customization through themes, plugins, and post types.

Thanks to those capabilities, WordPress eventually grew beyond just being a tool for building blogs – it became a full-blown CMS.

That’s great for building information-dense, text-heavy websites.

But the web is so much more than that now.

Enter Gutenberg.

WordPress owes its growth as a CMS, in large part, to the hodgepodge of metaboxes, shortcodes, widgets, and inline HTML that came to define the editor.

Gutenberg does away with all of that. Now we’re using blocks for everything.

This upends over a decade’s worth of experience, acquired knowledge, and standard practices for users.

It also introduces a whole new world of technology (and a potentially steep learning curve) for developers. You’ll find out about a lot of that during today’s sessions, whether it’s building your first custom block or addressing fears about the new editor.

But the new block paradigm also means we can stop thinking about our websites as collections of text documents.

Instead, we can think about our websites as a hub at the center of a diverse, media-rich online presence.

A successful online presence is more than just a website.

As I mentioned above, back when WordPress was first launched, social media wasn’t really a thing yet.

But times have changed.

We’re still hopping through Google when we’re looking for information, but we’re also looking elsewhere.

YouTube. Instagram. Facebook. Twitter. Pinterest. Just to name a few.

Then there’s the messenger apps, aka “dark social”, and good ol’ email.

These are destinations, places where people are spending their time, conversing and creating and publishing content.

And that content is more than just text – it’s also images and video. And with the rise of smart speakers and voice assistants, audio is making a comeback.

These diverse platforms, and the media types they cater to, are all touch points of a modern online presence.

Now imagine your WordPress site at the center of it all.

Let’s pull it together with an example.

Let’s say you’re working with a small business that sells handmade fashion accessories.

They have a domain name and a professional email address to go with it. They have an Instagram account with a few thousand followers, a Facebook page, an email newsletter, and an Etsy shop.

They don’t have a website. Their domain name redirects to their Etsy shop, and they collect email addresses by sending people to a signup form hosted by their email marketing service.

But they’re starting to think about building a website. So they talk to you, because you know WordPress.

You’re planning for a fresh WordPress build, and you know Gutenberg will be in core by the time the site launches.

How can you pull all of their things together with the help of the new editor?

You create contact forms. These forms go directly to their professional email address. You create different forms for different use cases, like contest entries or custom requests or general inquiries. The forms are added to posts and pages via blocks.

You add a newsletter subscription plugin. Now they can send people directly to their website to sign up. And the business can drop in that newsletter subscription block wherever they like.

You create a weekly blog post template. Using blocks and the Duplicate Post plugin, you create a template to clone for each week’s post. It includes placeholder blocks for adding updates from Instagram or products from Etsy. The bottom of the blog post includes the newsletter subscription block, so anyone who views the post can easily sign up.

You train the business to use the new editor. There’s no shortcodes for them to memorize, no custom fields to fill in. What they see in the editor is pretty darn close to what they get in the published post.

They publish. Once a week they go in and publish their blog post.

They share their weekly blog post on Facebook and Instagram. They share it as a Facebook page update with a link back to the blog post. On Instagram, it’s a story update that links to their blog post.

The weekly blog post also becomes newsletter content. Using their email marketing service (e.g. GoDaddy Email Marketing), they can drop in additional content that’s exclusive to their subscribers.

See the pattern?

Everything comes together as a compilation of blocks. We’re not stuffing shortcodes or inline HTML into a text document.

Blocks level things out. They flatten the hierarchy of page elements.