While large swaths of the WordPress community were protesting the arrival of Gutenberg with mixed feelings, I chose to embrace it early and often, but even late into its development, I felt unable to produce the same level of work my clients expected–so it was always back to the old ways: page builders and custom fields. In fall 2018, I finished a project that relied way heavily on custom fields; it was slow and its admin UI was confusing and it made like 150 custom fields per post, but it worked and looked great. After, though, I paused and I asked myself “am I sure I can’t do this with just Gutenberg?” So I set out to try. Spoiler alert: its possible, and I did it.

In this presentation, I’ll show you the old way vs the new way, and explain how I needed to change the way I do and think about things to deliver an identical site while shucking the crutches of page builders and custom fields and custom templates that has propped up my work for so long.