Bob Matyas

WordPress Block Theme Resources

Posted on    by  Bob Matyas

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Since the release of WordPress v5.9, Full Site Editing has been included in WordPress core. Full Site Editing -- when used with a compatible theme such as the default Twenty Twenty Two theme -- allows users to edit all of the site via the Site Editor. This is a huge improvement as it means that features that perhaps were locked away behind menus in the customizer or in PHP template files can now be changed without code.

To take advantage of this, you need to have a theme that is compatible with Full Site Editing. There are a number available on WordPress.org. For folks like me who have experience developing so-called "classic WordPress" themes, there is a lot to learn regarding block themes and how to build them.

I've started reading up on this and am noting some resources that have been useful for helping me to understand more about the new paradigm.

Overviews of Block themes

These articles were helpful for giving me a broad overview of block themes:

WordPress.org Docs

Understanding "theme.json"

One of the exciting parts about block theme compatible with full site editing is that you can use a theme.json file to set styles that would have required manually creating a stylesheet before. There is a lot of promise to this approach and the following articles helped me understand this a bit more.

Standardizing theme.json

Style Variations