Gutenberg (Block Editor)

Gutenberg — officially called the WordPress Block Editor — became the default content editor in WordPress 5.0 (released December 2018). It replaced the classic TinyMCE editor with a block-based system where every piece of content is a discrete block: paragraphs, headings, images, buttons, galleries, embeds, and more. Blocks can be arranged, nested, and configured individually, which gives editors a more structured way to build content compared to a flat text editor.

The name "Gutenberg" continues to be used in the WordPress community to refer to the block editor project, which includes both the editor itself and the broader Full Site Editing (FSE) initiative that extends blocks to headers, footers, and entire page templates.

How Gutenberg Stores Content

Gutenberg stores block content as HTML comments with embedded JSON in the post_content field of the WordPress database. A paragraph block looks like plain HTML, but a gallery or embed block includes structured data in the comment markup that WordPress uses to reconstruct the block when editing. This format is readable but not entirely portable — the comment-based structure is specific to WordPress’s block parser.

This is relevant for migration because extracting content from a Gutenberg-built site requires parsing these blocks. Simple text and heading blocks convert to clean HTML straightforwardly. More complex blocks — like custom blocks built with block plugins, or Reusable Blocks — need more attention. Third-party blocks from plugins like Kadence or GenerateBlocks also need to be evaluated for how their output translates.

Classic Editor vs. Gutenberg in Migration Context

Sites that still use the Classic Editor (via the Classic Editor plugin) store their content as plain HTML in post_content, which is simpler to extract and convert. If you’re migrating a site that has a mix of classic and Gutenberg content — which is common on sites that were around before 2018 and didn’t fully migrate their existing content — you’ll likely encounter both formats in the same database.

The Statamic Equivalent

Statamic has its own block-based content field: Bard. Bard combines a rich-text editor (built on ProseMirror) with the ability to embed configurable content sets inline. The experience for editors is similar to Gutenberg in spirit, but the implementation is different and the output is YAML-based rather than comment-annotated HTML.

Migrating Gutenberg content to Bard involves converting the block markup to Statamic’s format. For most common blocks, this is manageable. For heavily customized block setups, it’s worth scoping carefully during pre-migration planning.