WordPress silliness
Well, Full Site Editing is here. Thought I’d be excited about it.
So far it’s been a colossal pain in the arse to get existing designs converted to Block Themes.
For some unknown reason, WordPress 5.9 onwards prevents you from seeing a list of already created templates from WordPress 5.8. You have to access them from inside Post/Page editor with the template selector in 5.9.
All those spec/try out templates we made before 5.9, yea you can’t get to them any more easily.
Style editor still misses lots of Style options, for example, background (full RGB) colours and transparencies, images as backgrounds for certain blocks. No way to add your own customisations here yet either.
To add fonts, you need to call them via functions and in theme.json, the instructions to do each one and how they interact are all over the place.
Branding and global theming? Nope!
There are serious issues here.
Yes, you can customize everything, footers, headers, and content sections. But it fails to tell you what you are exactly editing. 404 template somehow doesn’t use the default content section or header.
Want a background image? Some people suggest putting a Cover block on the page and your header/content inside that. This breaks FullAlign and causes issues.
Combine this with the Gutenberg Editor which can be at times a complete pain in the arse when it’s decided it hasn’t got enough resources to act fast enough.
To be honest, this is making me think about sticking to hardcoded Custom Post Templates in PHP, and pure CSS changes.
Also, with the inability to have background images on certain templates, especially without headers/footers going nuts because the only solution at the moment is to put them in a cover block (rant alert!) … branding options aren’t great, though I could be missing some code to enable this in backend.
The Future
The Gutenberg method is taking off, and there is tons of nice designs/layouts coming out of it, but we really need to sort out WordPress terminology. A Template can mean so much stuff for example.
WordPress 6 is around the corner too and will introduce more trouble.