About Us

Welcome, dear WordPress traveler! Stay on top of important Gutenberg news with the Gutenberg Times. We publish

• posts on this website,
• links and news via our email weekend edition,
• an episode for the Gutenberg Changelog podcast every other week, and
• hold infrequent Live Q & As on Zoom and YouTube.

Who is running is this site?

My name is Birgit Pauli-Haack

Update August 30, 2021

On Monday, August 30th, I started as WordPress developer advocate with the Dotorg Division at Automattic and sponsor my work on the open-source project.

Update June 20, 2020

I am the owner and senior developer of Pauli Systems, a boutique WordPress agency. I also contribute to WordPress as a WordPress Meetup organizer here in Southwest Florida. For the last 5+ years, I have been volunteering on the WordPress Global Community team as a deputy. Since November 2020, I have been the team rep on the Block Editor End User Documentation team. We need more contributors! Join us!

What excites you most about the new Gutenberg editor?

The answer is two-fold: I started building websites because I wanted to put content on the web that was missing on the German Internet at the time. This was the late 1990’s and web content management systems didn’t exist yet, so I had to hand-code my navigation, pages, links, everything.

Better WYSIWYG for content creators

I know the pain of a content creator through all these generations of the web and we still haven’t solved the WYSIWYG idea that people know from Desktop Publishing, MS Word, or Adobe Insights. The proliferation of page builders for WordPress illustrated the need. Their implementation, however, is clunky and hazardous. Despite WordPress being an open system, most page builders and Themes lock you in. You might as well use Squarespace and Wix, get better support, and surrender to the fact that you have to rebuild your site from scratch if and when you want to leave those systems.

Gutenberg is the first editor that makes WYSIWYG possible in native WordPress. And it’s so elegant and beautiful. It takes technology out of the process of creating visually attractive content. It seems to hide all the difficulty a content creator encounters when writing for the web—the image positioning, the copy/pasting from Google Drive, the way you can highlight paragraphs, sharing blocks. Instead of knowing HTML or configuring yet another plugin, I just grab the button block, add the URL, and give it a nice color. It is a joy to work in Gutenberg every day. Your content not only shines on the desktop, but also on mobile,tablets, and phones. Yes, it’s still rough around the edges, but that’s to be expected. This is a ground-up re-imagining of the web WYSIWYG and that’s a huge task. It’s also not released yet and it keeps getting better.

Modern JavaScript code base: ReactJS

The other piece of the answer is that it’s built in a modern Javascript framework, ReactJS. It’s fascinating how that space has evolved over the last 8 years. I am excited to learn Javascript for the 3rd time. Learning ReactJS and ES6 is a great joy. I understand the theory and mechanics how blocks, shared blocks, and block templates will make a lot of things easier to build… once you are past the—admittedly huge—learning curve. I can’t wait to finish my first React/WordPress website.

Drew Gorton, Director of Developer Relations at Pantheon asked me the questions in his interview: Gutenberg Times + Pantheon: Spreading the Guten Word

Why Gutenberg Times

First on Storify then on a Gutenberg driven website, I have been curating Community voices about Gutenberg, the new visual editor for WordPress since June 2017, ever since I saw a demonstration of it at WordCamp Europe in Paris.

Some developement team members asked if I could create a newsletter so people get notified when there were new updates. Also, Adobe announced end of life for their Storify services. I realized I would need a different way to curate all the links and then have a method to send out the links once a week. I do this already for other publications. In order to make it possible I needed a WordPress site. – Gutenberg Times.

All editorial content is curated by me personally, and although I try to post inclusive and diverse opinions and perspectives, I am not without my own bias. The content posted here is only my own opinion, doesn’t reflect official views of the Gutenberg team nor of WordPress as a whole. I respect the good faith rules of WordPress meetups find then applicable to for content posted.  The comment section is moderated and is governed by WordCamps’ Code of Conduct.

For our call for sponsors, we will stay within the WordCamp rules for sponsors.

Infrastructure and Support

Pauli Systems, a web development agency in Florida founded in 2002 by yours truly was the main sponsor of this operation until 2021, when I started my full-time position at Automattic. Automattic also sponsors the Gutenberg Times as well as the Gutenberg Changelog podcast. Please contact Birgit at pauli@gutenbergtimes.com for more information.

Pantheon helped us during start-up phase and their sponsorship between April & September provided support towards our time curating, researching and participating on the discussions about Gutenberg. They still support us with hosting and Community outreach. Thank  you to Pantheon.

Our MailChimp account is sponsored by Pauli Systems, so is the domain name, the Brand24 account and all staff time attributed to Gutenberg Times content collection, curation, transcript and editing of podcast.