If you work with WordPress and you haven't taken a look at @EtchWPOfficial yet, you really need to. For the first time since WordPress was originally forked from cafelog, it's actually easy to build websites using WordPress properly. The keyword there being "properly". In the past, if you wanted to build a website and make it truly maintainable, scalable with clean code output, you basically had to build the entire thing from scratch in VSCode. Obviously that was a lot of work, and also made it quite difficult to build it in such a way that clients could easily update content. If you didn't feel comfortable building out the entire theme from scratch, and if you weren't comfortable with React and creating custom blocks, your only option was to use some kind of garbage builder like Elementor, Divi, Gutenberg etc etc. These tools make putting something together "easy" but they are a far cry from maintainable, scalable and I'm having a hard time even typing the words "clean code" in the same post as "elementor" or "divi" or "gutenberg". What is Etch and why is it the better tool? I can answer that very succinctly. Maintainability/scalability: Etch somehow manages to perfectly marry the concepts of having 100% access to your code and having a UI you can click on. This makes things like using variables, and creating components incredibly easy, making your website much easier to manage. It also only outputs the code you give it. No extra divs or containers, no weird default styling screwing everything up. Etch also turns everything you do into Gutenberg blocks, which means your clients can update content using the built in gutenberg page editor. No more training clients on how to use Elementor or Divi. There is a lot more that could be said about Etch, but those are the big things that make it stand out from Elementor, Divi, Oxygen, Bricks, Breakdance, Gutenberg, Themify, Beaver Builder, [insert WP builder here]. The rest is just icing on the cake (and trust me, there is a LOT of icing on this cake). I tried to put my thoughts into video form, and unsurprisingly, I was pretty disappointed with it as after I published it I thought of like 5 more things I wish I had talked about, but if you're interested you can check out that video (link in the comments).

I'm kind of fighting an internal battle regarding WordPress and the WordPress community on Twitter. The only reason I started using Twitter in the first place was to become involved in the WordPress community. When I first started using it, I was still drinking the WordPress kool-aid. I believed that WordPress was objectively the best platform out there, I believed that it was easy to use, I believed it was intuitive, and I believed page builders like Elementor, Divi etc (I used Themify) were the future. I call it kool-aid because there were so many obvious signs that there were problems, but I ignored all of them. For whatever reason I just really wanted to believe everything was unicorns and rainbows and I convinced my self it was. It was completely irrational behavior. Kool-aid. I ignored the problems of WordPress itself because I thought Themify solved all of those problems for me. I would later realize that I was just ignoring red flags in the page builder workflow as well. I was drinking WordPress kool-aid, and Themify kool-aid. There were two things that broke through my cult-like admiration for WordPress. The first thing was when I sat down and tried to put together a "WordPress for Dummies" course. As a guy with a pretty strong customer support background I'm pretty good at imagining what a layperson might do/think and the more I worked on this course the more I realized that most lay people were going to struggle with just about every single step of the process of setting up a WordPress website. Not only is WordPress itself not as intuitive as I always told myself that it was, but even just the process of even getting to the point of looking at a WordPress dashboard is beyond what any lay person is going to put up with. Anything beyond going to wordpress.com, adding some crap theme and writing some blog posts is going to be too much for the average lay person. The second thing that helped break through my kool-aid induced fervor was encountering @thekevingeary. I can't remember if I first read a tweet, blog post or saw a video. But I was still mostly drinking the koolaid so I remember not agreeing with what he was saying. But I kept reading/watching his content and thinking more and more about what he was saying and realizing that I kept disagreeing with him but couldn't articulate why. I couldn't come up with any counter arguments. My response was mostly "psshh I mean..well...nuh uh!" Basically one day it all just sort of clicked. I finally just admitted that WordPress is not intuitive, I also realized that Gutenberg was much worse than I thought. I hadn't used it ever because I didn't like it when it first came out so I used Themify, and I kind of assumed that over the past 8 years or whatever that it had probably improved a lot. Consuming Kevin's content made me realize that it really hadn't. I started seeing posts like "GB has border radius controls now!" and watched as people celebrated in the streets. After 8 years, they were celebrating border radius. And they weren't celebrating in a "oh my gosh FINALLY" kind of way, it was celebrating in a "wow isn't GB just so great!" kind of way. I saw posts like "the button block now renders as a button!" and thought to myself what the hell was it rendering as this whole time? I'm guessing a link? Is there not already a link block? I also realized that I had been putting up with a lot more than I thought I was with Themify, and that while using Themify is still a better experience than using Gutenberg, it still has a ton of issue and roadblocks. I was writing so much custom CSS to make Themify do what I want that I eventually thought why the hell don't I just do this from scratch since I'm writing so much CSS anyways? Problem is there just wasn't really a good way to do that. Before @EtchWPOfficial came along, you basically had two options: 1. no-code/low-code, Elementor, Gutenberg, Themify etc etc. 2. Completely code the entire thing from scratch, html/css/js/PHP etc. I didn't like either of those extremes. But I definitely disliked 1 more than 2. And I started to think, if I'm going to be coding everything completely from scratch, I should probably look into a platform that is more modern, and encourages best practices and actually has a roadmap and actually listens to what customers want and tries to keep up with competition. I saw many people were leaving WordPress for @statamic, plus I have a very smart friend who left WordPress many years ago for OctoberCMS and recently left that for Statamic. I was starting to look into leaving WordPress for Statamic when Etch came along and completely changed WordPress development. Etch isn't like anything else in the WordPress space. I've seen a lot of ignorant haters who will never give Etch a chance because they think Kevin is a big meany head so they have no idea what Etch is or what it does and they constantly shit on Kevin and his products. They call it "just another no-code builder" 🤦‍♂️Many of these people are the same ones complaining about Kevin "shitting on Gutenberg" all the time. (project much?) Etch is perfect for someone like me who wants to do things properly, someone who is tired of the stress of page builders, someone who is pretty familiar with html/css/js but doesn't really want to sit down and code entire PHP templates from scratch. Not only has he provided Etch, and ACSS, two tools that have completely transformed my workflow for the better, but I've also learned a TON in the past few months just from watching his live streams. He may rub some people the wrong way sometimes but I truly believe he's done more for the WP community than almost every person who's ever got mad at me or him for criticizing WordPress. I know MM wouldn't agree with me because in his mind, the only way to contribute to WP is to do free development work for him. So anyways, what's my internal struggle? The struggle is this: On one hand, I really shouldn't care about what's happening in WordPress/Gutenberg land. I don't use Gutenberg, I never will use Gutenberg so it doesn't actually affect me in any way if product development for GB is incredibly slow and seemingly arbitrary. It doesn't matter to me. But on the other hand, I'm still a WordPress guy and it just frustrates me to no end that the platform has pretty much stagnated over the past decade. It frustrates me to watch people praise it when it's objectively bad. GB is bad for people who want more access to the code, and it's not even good for people who don't want to see code. All no-code page builders are going to be inherently limited, and GB is the most limited of all due to years and years of terrible product development strategy. You have to add things to it like Kadence or Ollie to make it even remotely usable. And whenever someone brags about how they use the block editor all the time they always conveniently leave out the incredible amount of customization that went into building anything other than a basic page full of rectangles. So I keep going back and forth between "who cares it's not my problem" and "WHAT ARE THESE PEOPLE THINKING WHY ARE THEY PUTTING UP WITH THIS GARBAGE" and I know that it would be better for my mental health and my online reputation to try and lean more into "who cares it's not my problem" but it's just soooooo hard. I want to be part of the community because I'm a social guy. I love hanging out with folks at WordCamp. But I know that there are people who don't like me because I criticize the almighty WordPress. They'll say it's because I'm rude or mean or whatever but it's not that. It's because I criticize WordPress. I've watched many people respond to WordPress criticism (from myself, Kevin and others) with over the top, unprovoked rudeness and then they try to pain us as the mean ones. It's OK to be rude as long as you're pro-gutenberg. If you're not pro-gutenberg then you're just an asshole. It really does feel like a cult sometimes. People take criticism of WordPress WAY too personally. They don't seem to understand that it's literally just a clump of characters. It's just code. It's a web development tool. You didn't create it, criticism of it is not a personal attack on you, your mother or your deity. If you can scream at the TV and post angry tweets when your favorite team's quarterback throws an interception, then I can yell at my computer monitor and post angry tweets when my favorite web dev platform fumbles the ball (constantly). Neither of us are bad people for either of those actions. Anyways I'm trying folks. I'm trying to stop caring so much, I'm trying to learn to just let people live in their blissful ignorance. I'm trying to remind myself that it doesn't matter if they like garbage tools, because I don't have to use their garbage tools. I found a good tool, I have a good workflow, and I'm trying to be happy with it. But pray for me cuz it's hard 🙏🙏