First, a bit of history. I've been a long time WP developer. After initially starting out with a Joomla 😱 site around 2008, I've primarily built everything for myself and my clients in WordPress. That I think makes me a long time supporter and believer in WP, or so I think. I remember having to convince clients WordPress was not "just for blogs". Those were tough times. To be fair, I started building with WordPress before WP 3.0 was released. So, while was certainly possible to build any kind of site you wanted, it was WP 3.0 that really made it feel like WordPress was the CMS that could do it all.
Now, it hasn't been all smooth sailing in my relationship with WP. Like any relationship there have been occasional ups and downs. The biggest one was that over time I found it frustrating that WP core was not moving toward any solution to make content editing easier for clients. I chimed in on some WP support threads asking for better, but the response from core contributors was always "that's plugin territory". At first the best simple solution for improving editing for my clients was a plugin that enabled you to have multiple tabs of TinyMCE editors 😱 (not to overuse that emoji in this post, but it's called for there)! Thankfully, ACF came along and continued to improve. It certainly enabled a better (even less breakable) editing experience for clients, while helping me continue to provide good value for my clients. However, because of these concerns it definitely led me to keep more of an eye open to other options.
That takes us to more recent times and it explains part of the reason for why this site was built with Grav. That being said, I continued to work in WP on a daily basis and build most of my client's sites in WordPress. And you can imagine I was very excited when the WP core team did in fact change their minds and decide that indeed the editor needed a complete revamp. I was a big supporter of the Gutenberg project and jumped in very early to start using the Block Editor to build client sites. I won't say it was pretty. And I certainly ended up putting in a lot of extra (unbilled) hours. But it was clear this was the future, it was the right move, and it would pay off for everyone in the end.
Now, here we are in the present day. The Block Editor, I think, is a impressive piece of technology. I love building client sites with it. I love seeing it improve with every iteration. I'm not going to blindly say it's perfect. There's probably still a fair way to go. But saying that to me is what makes it impressive, in that the Block Editor is very good now despite there yet being clearly more work to be done. Long story short, the time has come to move this site back to WordPress so I can enjoy the new editor experience for myself. I have developed and refined what I think is a great base / developer theme that I can build custom sites out for my clients and so I can't wait to use to build this site.
