Is the new Gutenberg WordPress editor a copy of Medium?

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7 min readAug 28, 2018

Those of you who work with WordPress have certainly heard about new rich content editor called Gutenberg (or perhaps have tried it already). It is intended to replace the default WYSIWYG editor. Its ambition is even to push out the various third-party Page Builders from the market. As I mentioned in my previous article, many WordPress authors have their own drag & drop Page Builders used for website building in a more streamlined way.

What I noticed is that there’s quite a lot of fuss around Gutenberg for quite some time. Many bloggers literally speak about the revolution. With the arrival of WordPress 5.0, some say that a new era in creating WordPress pages is coming. WordPress fans take this really seriously :)

But is it really true that Gutenberg brings something completely new? Something that was not here before?

Illusion of innovation

One of the most significant changes in content editor is a different way of inserting content and writing text as such (I intentionally used the word different instead of new, I’ll explain why later).

So far, for example you had to:

Select the written text and click on the WYSIWYG editor toolbar to make the text a heading

Klick on a button Add Media, if you wanted to add an image from the gallery

Gutenberg changes the way of text management and simplifies it by introducing the concept of blocks. Everybody talks about it as a novelty in the WordPress world which will completely change the functioning of WP websites and how it is a breakthrough. The principle of inserting blocks works like this: you click on “+” symbol and you can add almost anything within the editor. Text, heading, citation, image or video.

By the way, doesn’t it sound familiar to you? Haven’t you ever encountered this kind of content insertion and editing?

*I will give you a hint. If you wrote at least one article right here, in Medium, you know what I’m saying.

Indubitable similarity with Medium

If you guessed that Gutenberg reminds you of Medium, you guessed right. If it hasn’t occurred to you or you are only a reader on Medium (not an author), see how WYSIWYG works in Medium:

Adding image/ video/ embed etc. via Medium

One cannot deny that the principle of the “new” Gutenberg way is almost identical to that of the “old” Medium. Is it just a coincidence? I do not think so.

I think Gutenberg really found inspiration in Medium. And perhaps so high inspiration that some malevolent people could claim it has stolen the whole editing principle.

The similarity in content management is also somehow visible in one of the most praised functions. Mat Mullenweg, the co-founder of WordPress was rhapsodizing about it on the last WordCamp Europe 2018 event.

It’s a Copy and Paste function, including simple embedding.

The advantage of this feature is that you can copy any text from Google Docs, Word or other popular web application and conveniently paste it into content editor in your wp-admin. While doing that there is no danger that your text formatting breaks on your page or that the font or font size gets changed. That sounds pretty good, doesn’t it?

No doubt this is a very useful feature for the users, but again… It’s nothing new that Medium could not provide earlier.

Historical background

In order to avoid being a hater without any reason, I decided to take a closer look at who came up first with the above-mentioned functions (and therefore who’s a copycat).

Medium was co-founded by co-founders of Twitter — Evan Williams and Biz Stone who launched Medium 6 years ago. It was in August 2012. For comparison, I also tried to find the first official mention of Gutenberg, but I did not find a specific date anywhere. However, I most often encountered articles from June to September 2017 which brought up early information about new upcoming editor (if you know about another date, please let me know and I will update it).

These articles came out after Mullenweg’s talk at WordCamp Europe 2017 when the Gutenberg concept was sketched more or less for the first time.

What does it mean?

That people talk loudly about Gutenberg for only a year.

If we were to take it strictly chronologically, it is clear that Gutenberg’s creators cannot pretend they invented something brand new — especially when all the features the new editor uses are already well known to the public.

Gutenberg is (not) disguised Medium

Of course we have to look at Gutenberg from the other side too. WordPress must for sure modernize somehow to keep pace with other platforms and competing online with web generators such as Wix, Squarespace or Weebly. These are becoming more and more popular not only among end-users, but also among developers (I personally like online builders too).

Because to be honest, WordPress is a very robust and complicated platform with its infinite possibilities, settings and an incredible amount of plugins and addons. Also, the content management is not always trouble-free in WordPress, so it makes sense there’s a demand to come up with something easier to use.

Hence come up with Gutenberg.

It is not always necessary to invent a wheel (what technology giants such as Apple or Samsung know very well — you just need to look apart from all those patent litigation processes :)).

And so Gutenberg dismissively collected many useful features from various rich content editors (like the above mentioned Medium) and online website creators, and it’s trying to get them together into one place. The result is to be the new WordPress content editor that can be competitive and that people will love to use within the WordPress community.

There will be many useful features in Gutenberg. By allowing texts, images or videos to be inserted through blocks, they can be replicated. And what’s even better — as soon as you change something on one Page, this change will appear wherever this block is located. I missed such a feature in WordPress because this had to be edited manually. And if you had the same thing say 5 times on various places on your website, you had enough to do for at least one hour.

I believe Custom blocks will also be greatly exploited as they will provide developers with new ways of creation of customized sections that developers will be able to use repeatedly (and e.g. via nested blocks prevent users from inserting something that doesn’t fit).

Another advantage of Gutenberg is also that the standardized layout of blocks allows developers to work with the template more easily.

Not only will the customization be more comfortable, but also the preparation of the responsive version of the website will be visible easier and faster.

Apparent is also Gutenberg’s effort to phase out paid Page Builders from other developers by attempting to take over their features and offer them to users free of charge — right in the WordPress core. Now, however, we can only guess what will happen to these page builders if Gutenberg gets integrated to all WordPress websites. It will depend mainly on whether it will be able to offer such features so that there’ll be no need to install a special Page Builder.

But I think there is no such thing at the moment because Gutenberg is still full of bugs :). And it hasn’t even been officially released yet. The arrival of WordPress 5.0 is also questionable, though it should happen sometime during August 2018. I do not want to be too negative, but I personally do not believe that the developers will manage to meet the deadline — because today is the 28th of August already.

So copying or inspiration?

No matter how big the resemblance of the new WordPress content editor with Medium is, it cannot be said with certainty that it’s a copy. I do not have the bullet proof evidence for that :) But rather I would say that it is most likely an intense inspiration — in order to get the best of the available editors and transfer it to wp-admin. Perhaps we should look forward to Gutenberg and enjoy the fact that it will make WordPress more simple and make it more attractive for an even larger spectrum of users.

What do you say about the fact that Gutenberg reminds of Medium? Is it okay or do you think it’s copying? Let’s discuss this!