Eleven days ago I set myself a weekend challenge: build "Canva for WordPress."
Not another page builder. A page builder on top of Gutenberg that a complete beginner could use with zero training. The page is the canvas. You edit on the front end. You drag, resize, rotate, snap to guides. And when you hit publish, it spits out real Gutenberg blocks — no shortcodes, no lock-in, and zero JavaScript on the published page.
Fable and I got a working MVP out in a weekend. Working title: Gogh.
Then I posted it, mostly to see if I was the only person who wanted this.
I wasn't.
What actually happened
The first post did about 9,200 views on X with 132 likes and 27 replies. On LinkedIn the same post has done 5,485 impressions with 154 reactions, 26 comments and 7 reposts. Across all the Gogh posts since, that's roughly 14,000 views and 40-odd replies on X, and 42 comments on LinkedIn.
Those aren't Mr Beast numbers. But for a plugin that doesn't exist yet, with a name half the internet can't pronounce, it's the strongest signal I've had on anything I've built in years.
The more interesting bit is what people said.
Theme 1: I have been asking this exact question for three years
Three years ago I made a video called "Is Canva Websites a WordPress killer?" — 17,000 views, 580 likes. A year after that I made "Does WordPress need a Canva-style Drag and Drop Page Builder for Complete Beginners?" — 9,400 views. Then "The Billion Dollar WordPress Page Builder Idea" — 9,900 views, 441 likes and 288 comments.
Three videos. Three years. Roughly 36,000 views and 1,200 likes between them. At the end of each one I said some version of "wouldn't this be great?" — and then went and did something else.
I'd more or less forgotten all of it until Derek Hanson commented on the Gogh post: "Making good on your old video about Canva and WordPress." So I went back and read those comment threads properly. It's a bit eerie.
From the Canva video:
Mary Peterson Cook: "I was making a new page yesterday and was just so frustrated that it wasn't as easy a drag and drop experience as Canva! Not even elementor."
Mark Constable: "please, can we have that canvaberg plugin sooner than later! … What Gutenberg needs is a truly seemless WYSIWYG editing experience without the modal preview crap."
Scott Rowe: "the fine folks behind the wheel at WP should do a full-press analysis of the Canva site building suite of tools and build the same (or an even more expansive) set of features into the Gutenberg editor."
And then the 288 comments under "The Billion Dollar WordPress Page Builder Idea", which read like a focus group I ran two years early and then ignored.
Karl (@familysmid6507) described the target user better than any of my slides have: "I am exactly the person you describe, I have no idea what Flexbox is. I teach and coach business English and that is what I want to focus on … not banging my head against a brick wall trying to understand a simple thing like padding and margins."
@RobertFlemingstonehill: "Not crazy!!! Have thought this for a long time. I am a 30 year veteran full stack developer and still struggle to understand the basic philosophy of WordPress."
@anmariejames2646 specified Gogh's headline feature in fourteen words, two years before I wrote a line of it: "Yes please! A drag and drop builder that uses actual WordPress elements sounds amazing."
@diZtHoMaS: "I've been a Canva Pro subscriber for years for all my graphics work… and smack talking WP over this exact issue for almost as long."
Joyce Young: "Just do it Jaime! There are lots like me who would be happy, happy, happy!"
I read those and felt slightly told off. People were asking for this back then. I made three videos about it and then went and did something else.
Theme 2: put it in core, or at least on .org
The loudest single request was distribution. Cristian Raiber's entire reply was "get this in coreeeeee." Nat Miletic asked, drily, "Anything to avoid using Elementor or Bricks hey?" Ana Cirujano on LinkedIn: "Yes, put it on WP.org! We want to play with it. What you're building is absolutely insane, and I love it. Even if you're burning AI tokens like there's no tomorrow."
Fair on the tokens.
I've said in the replies that I'm aiming for a WordPress.org release, and the code is already on GitHub. But "get this in core" is a different conversation, and one I'm not going to pretend I can answer on my own.
Theme 3: the no-lock-in thing is the actual feature
I thought the drag-and-drop was the headline. Several people told me the headline is what happens at publish time.
MD Emon Hasan nailed it: "Zero JS on the published output while still reflowing to CSS Grid is the real trick, most freeform builders punt on that and just ship a pile of inline styles."
Eugene Bevziuk went further, and this is the comment I keep rereading: "I've spent years building custom Gutenberg and ACF block systems for clients. They're incredibly powerful for large, complex websites, but the reality is that most projects don't need that level of flexibility — they need simplicity. If WordPress can offer both a frictionless editing experience for beginners and the ability to grow into advanced custom solutions, that's the sweet spot."
That's a better articulation of why I built it than anything in my original post.
Theme 4: people want to build on it
This one caught me off guard. Shazil Khan: "Looks phenomenal. Will this be open source? I'd love to contribute." Sunny Soni: "I would love to fork it to develop a Wix like AI builder." @mrkwordpress: "I'd suggest sharing a github repo and getting a few contributors to this. Looks like it can solve some pretty big issues for the page editor feeling overwhelming for so many user's."
Muhammad Abdullah Khan, who builds WordPress automation for agencies: "this is going to be a big disruptive experience for the people who wanted to use the block editor because this will reimagine the experience."
@nickventuri summarised the vibe in seven words: "like gutenberg finally got its shit together."
And Riza (@rizaardiyanto), who's actually been using the playground demo: "I've been testing gogh for the past few days, and I would say, I'm impressed!"
Theme 5: the pushback, which is the useful part
Not everyone is sold, and the critics have been more helpful than the fans.
James Higginbotham's point is the one that worries me most: "moving components around, even with snap grids, requires far more knowledge of good layout and design skills. To take this to non-designers, it likely needs pre built layouts." He's right. Freedom isn't the same as ease. A blank canvas is terrifying if you're not a designer — which is precisely the audience I claimed to be building for.
Gerasimos Tsiamalos pushed back on the rearranging UX: "I think it'd be better if the rearrangement took place in a sidebar so the actual preview would be instant. People usually reorder when they try to tell a story (landing pages mostly) and instant preview is key for this."
Onur Oztaskiran was blunter about my design taste: "who uses wavy section separator svgs in 2026?" Also fair.
And then there's the name. Remkus de Vries: "You're only allowed to use that name if you know how to pronounce it." Alen Širola: "Great idea, but as someone said — bad name." Wes Kriesel was the only person on my side, with "Excellent idea! Gogh do it!"
I've decided my position on pronunciation is to cut to a video of a Dutch person saying it every single time.
The 2024 critics got there first, too
Going back through the old video comments, the objections were sharper two years ago than they are now — because back then I had nothing to show, so nobody was being polite.
@Gearyco named the trap: "The problem with tools like this is that they produce horrific HTML and CSS, throw accessibility out the window, and are usually a disaster on mobile. If you just drag things around and plop them places, the only CSS solution for that is absolute positioning."
That's the one thing I engineered around — Gogh reflows a freeform canvas into CSS Grid at publish time rather than spraying absolutely-positioned divs across the page. Put that next to MD Emon Hasan's comment from this month ("Zero JS on the published output while still reflowing to CSS Grid is the real trick, most freeform builders punt on that") and two strangers two years apart have written the same design brief.
@JonathanCampDesigner: "Ok as a web developer I now want all headings 2pt smaller, in a diff colour and range left 🤣 whoops…. And I want a 'posts' page with pic and summary, auto generated, sorted by date. … whoops… And I want ecommerce integrated with filters and sorting…. Whoops… Oh and I want it responsive…. Whoops…"
@drigis3 asked the question I don't have a good answer to: "Isn't the market already flooded with unprofessional, inaccessible websites? As a business model, it is good, but what will it bring to the world?"
@derekshort took the purist line: "People should have to learn website design, at least the fundamentals." In a separate comment he also wrote "Nothing worth doing is easy," which I've chosen to read as encouragement.
@davidentwistle4068 answered the blank-canvas question two years before James Higginbotham and I started arguing about it: "The drag-and-drop approach is not incompatible with systematic design, so long as it can be used for creating page templates as well as page content. And a grid system is a well-known way of regularising design relationships."
So — should we build it?
The demo is real. You can try it in WordPress Playground right now and it's on GitHub. It took a weekend to get to MVP and about ten days of late nights to get to "actually quite nice."
But a weekend project and a maintained plugin are separated by roughly two years of support tickets. Before I commit to that, I'd like to know three things, and only you can tell me:
- Would you actually build your own site with this? Not "would you recommend it to a client" — would you, the person who wants a website and doesn't want to learn Flexbox to get one, use this for the real thing? Or is it a fun toy you'd play with in Playground for ten minutes? Be brutal. "Fun toy" is a completely legitimate answer.
- Blank canvas or starting layouts? James Higginbotham's point stands, and David Entwistle made the same one in 2024. Should Gogh ship with a library of pre-built, drag-ready layouts and templates so nobody faces an empty page — or does that just make it another pattern library?
- *Free on WordPress.org, or something more ambitious?* Several people have offered to contribute. If this is going to be a community thing rather than a Pootlepress thing, that changes how I build it from here.
Leave a comment, reply on X or LinkedIn, or open an issue on GitHub. I'll read every one — I've read every one so far, including the ones about the name.
And if the answer is "no, Jamie, this is a solved problem, go and do something else," I'd rather hear it now than in eighteen months.
Two years ago, under that "Billion Dollar Page Builder" video, I pinned a clip of Melanie Perkins describing the objection Canva heard from investors early on:
"Building a design product for non-designers — why would you do that?"
I pinned it, felt clever about it, and then didn't build anything for two years.
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