Introduction — Why WPCE?

There are lots of element-based editors for WordPress – Elementor, Divi, WPBakery and, last but not least, WordPress' own block editor, also known as Gutenberg. So there is a certain need to justify maintaining yet another editor.

tl;dr

WPCE fills a different niche.

As its name — WordPress Content Editor — suggests, WPCE is a content editor, not a page builder. As such, it has much more in common with headless CMSs like Contentful or strapi. So while WPCE is surfaced to end users directly through WordPress, it is designed for web developers.

This is reflected in various significant differences compared to page builders:

• WPCE does not allow users to arbitrarily style elements. It treats styling as a task for professionals, where opportunities to vary element display have to be exposed explicitly.
• WPCE does not even have any elements out of the box. It is up to the developer to define them.
• WPCE is not concerned too much with the frontend. While it offers a way to render content and some helpers around it, WPCE documents are just structured data ready to be processed by any application that can make use of them.

These core concepts stem from the editor's history — WPCE was created in a web agency context. At OWNBIT, we are not primarily developing public WordPress plugins for everybody to use, but we create durable websites and keep maintaining them.

Whoever has seen the mess of a home-grown WordPress site knows that for any serious business, it's rarely a good idea to leave the whole creation process of a website to laypeople. Instead, we want to enable our customers to create flexible content for their websites, but with carefully crafted guard rails that prevent the site from descending into chaos over time.

These motives shape the design of the WordPress Content Editor.