A shift for WordPress publishing
Like everything on the web, WordPress keeps evolving and changing fast. In the early days of it being a nicely typeset CMS for bloggers and writers, the editor offered great formatting options though the themes needed substantial edits for more creative layouts. This changed slowly to offer more and more flexibility as WordPress grew in popularity. Always aiming to look after publishers and offering them the options they wished for, to give them their voice and the ability to easily put themselves online, WordPress introduced the Gutenberg blocks.
These blocks are essentially well developed and ready-to-use formatting functions. Easily added to any post or page via the editor, they offer additional formatting options and are inherently responsive. Layout options are flexible to stack on mobile, for example, and the use of the blocks does not require any coding or technical skills from the publisher. The community of developers debated and argued about how this was implemented. Some not happy at all, others able to see the potential. Publishers, however, felt that the blocks gave them both control over their layouts as well as offering them more creative approaches to presenting their content. They soon became familiar with it and loved the new additions which came with core updates: easy galleries, embeds for external media and more.
The lastest move: Full-Site Editing (FSE)
The Gutenberg blocks are now well established. Their implementation has been refined and improved, optimised for easier use as well as better performance. Generally it is fair to say that both users and developers have adjusted.
The next big move split the crowd even more extremely. WordPress has now moved towards full site editing and introduced so-called block themes. Practically speaking, publishers now can edit the site templates directly from the admin interface. The appearance panel—which in the past had easy options to create and edit the site menus—no longer features such functions. Instead, there is a theme editor which leads to a whole new interface and an index of templates and template parts. This integrates perfectly with the Gutenberg blocks and essentially offers control over every small detail of content formatting as well as the overall layout of the sites design. Again, this move was a long time in the making and all done with the aim to give publishers what they ask for.
In my humble opinion…
On first look of the Gutenberg blocks back then, I was unsure. The implementation was initially quite sketchy, but as expected for the community of brilliant WordPress developers, this all changed very quickly and the blocks evolved and soon, they were easy to use and were indeed a step towards empowering the publishers. More flexibility brought more creative approaches to presenting online content ~ a great tool at their fingertips.
Our clients are typically teams of people working for charities or academics aiming to output their research. This means that our publishers’ time is usually best spent on the work itself with publishing being merely their final step. We have been recommending WordPress for over 20 years by now. It always was the ideal CMS – so easy and intuitive to use. That was the case for the default WordPress themes by Automattic or our own themes. We could reassure those who would be in charge of updating the site that there would be no steep learning curve but rather something they would soon get used to. Once familiar, we knew they would be able to manage edit and update this websites easily – even if they switched themes. With the Gutenberg blocks there was a little bit of a adjustment period but soon everyone was flying.
Looking at the full site editing direction now – I am worried. If a website has a whole team of people to take care of content creation publishing and managing of the web presence, there might be enough time for training, for learning the ins and outs of these new themes. There is great control but to make the most of the available options much more time is now needed to get to grips with the system and to ensure a consistent final design.
For us as theme designers and builders, this changes things. Our clients are usually more limited in people power and time. They come to us for the very reason of not having to learn a complex system to create a professional looking website. Some like experimenting with layouts. Yet most ask us to ensure that they themselves could not mess up the neatly designed layout we create for them and worry that their mistake might cause display errors and the like.
Luckily, we can still build themes that do not include these extra complexities and make site updates easy for our clients. Well, for now at least…
Sadly, I cannot see any of our clients being keen on this new direction. I always loved that Automattic and the WordPress community aim to do right by people, by publishers and content creators. My concern now is that the ease of use is being lost… those new to web publishing, and who are not interested in technical and digital challenges, are no longer being looked after.
Learning WordPress theming
If you are here to learn how to create your own theme from your static prototype design, then I think my tutorial on this site will still server you well. Especially if you are very new to web design and development. It will give you a good start and you will learn to understand how templates and theming works.
If you are looking to become a WordPress developer however, you will need to dive into the new themes as soon as you feel ready. Learn about their setups and complexities ~ you never know, you might love this new approach and end up working on huge sites with a fully staffed web team ツ