If WordPress gets CPTs in Core, we also need custom fields

In her piece on Gutenberg 23.1, Rae Morey quoted my reaction to Jamie Marsland’s celebratory tweet about WordPress shipping a native UI for registering custom post types: So… how long before we get this for custom fields too? That was a tweet. This is the longer version. Credit where it’s due Shipping native CPT registration in Gutenberg, on its way to Core, is a real step. Nik Tsekouras and Marin Atanasov went from tracking issue to merged PR in under two weeks. That is the kind of velocity WordPress needs more of, not less. The people grumbling that this should have shipped in 5.0 are technically right, but it’s here now, and that is good. The skeptics in Rae’s piece (Jonathan Desrosiers, Brad Williams, Paolo Tajani) aren’t wrong to ask whether this belongs in plugin territory. CPT UI has more than a million active installs. There’s a real argument that Core shouldn’t compete here. I, however, disagree. Content modeling is foundational. The job of a CMS in 2026 is to let you…