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What is Full Site Editing
Full Site Editing brings design back into WordPress’s main editor, Gutenberg, allowing you to create a blank canvas to work from, and call in various theme queries to make templates and their parts global.
When you make a page/post using blocks in WordPress’s Gutenberg editor, you are pretty much designing as well as writing.
Will it kill Page Builders?
Nope.
There are lots more functions in Page Builders than Gutenberg’ Full Site Editing wouldn’t even want to go near. Dynamic content from Custom Fields or other posts, JavaScript-heavy slideshows with fancy layouts for a few examples.
Despite some blocks in Gutenberg behaving much better than the plugins versions, it misses vital design options like Padding and Margins. By default you can assign each block its own class so these can be styled by targeting CSS at the block’s ID/class.
Gutenberg is also a bit more of a pain to use as it’s not a ‘natural’ feeling still, Elementor was a pain too, but did have lots of block customization independent of themes. Which reminds me, Gutenberg has no way to override Theme widths until you specify it as a Template (which also takes out all your site CSS from that template).
Expected Changes
Collaboration is mentioned for the next big release, which will allow other users logged into your site to leave notes and suggestions on your designs on the admin side of the site.
Really hoping for more block customization, as well as an easier way to make your own blocks without running a React server to start them off.
This is still Experimental (in a weird way…), so to have the extra menu options in most themes you need to add some code to your theme’s functions.php and Gutenberg plugin installed.
add_theme_support( 'block-templates' );
This will unlock the basics, there are some colour palettes and other bits for certain block examples on WordPress’s dev docs (moves around from what I’ve seen!).
I’ll be messing around with it and putting some examples up soonish.