The document discusses the future of WordPress themes with the introduction of Gutenberg blocks. It outlines some issues with current themes, such as lock-in and disjointed experiences. It describes how blocks will replace shortcodes and widgets by providing user interfaces. Block templates will allow predefined block structures. Page builders may become less necessary as blocks can be used to build full sites. Themes may provide companion block plugins and styling support for third-party blocks instead of bundling custom blocks. Overall, blocks represent a fundamental shift that will change themes and site-building.
7. 1. One theme to rule them all.
2. Themes with page building built-in.
3. Themes compatible with specific page builders.
4. Theme lock-in.
5. You donât know what youâre buying, âtill you install it.
6. Disjointed WordPress experience.
10. â Blocks are a fundamental shift in how content is
created within WordPress.
â In todayâs WordPress, there are a multitude of ways to
add very similar content... like widgets and
shortcodes.
17. â Block API is more flexible than the Widgets API
â All widgets should should appear as blocks
â Thereâs no difference between blocks and widgets
â No need for widget visibility settings
19. â Pre-defined templates of blocks
â Blocks can have predefined attributes, placeholder
content, and be static or dynamic.
â Block templates specify a default initial state for an
editor session.
20.
21. â Custom post types can register templates
â Block templates for posts and pages too
â Locking Block Templates
â All â Prevents all operations
â Insert â Enable reordering, but prevents inserting new blocks
25. The key thing with page templates
is that we want all of it to be
potentially covered by blocks, not
just the_content.
â Matias Ventura
26. As soon as we expand the scope, include more
blocks (site title, header, menus, widgets, etc), and
describe a way to store page templates as a list of
blocks, Gutenberg would be fundamentally capable
of building an entire website.
â Matias Ventura
29. â Nobody wants a shortcode soup
â Nobody wants the complex interfaces authors
build to hide/manage them
â Why would folks accept with difficult experiences
when we can have a familiar (and great) native
experience everywhere?
31. The future of themes can become
more about empowering users to
work on their vision, instead of
always having to learn how to theme.
â David A. Kennedy, Automattic
34. â Blocks built to expand your themeâs purpose
â Example: A simple blog theme may have ad
placement blocks, blogroll posts blocks, call to
actions, etc
â Themes can also support third-party blocks by adding
custom styling
37. â When a block no longer exists, the HTML markup is
spit out, instead of a [button color=ââ/] code
â You still lose any subjective styles that your theme
has applied â but objective styles should remain
(as they should be built into themes)
39. â Youâll likely need additional styles to resolve conflicts
â Gutenberg loads its own styles for many blocks
(buttons, block quotes, images, galleries, cover
images, horizontal rules, etc)
40.
41. â Do not load the entire frontend stylesheet into the
Gutenberg editor
â Prepend with .edit-post-visual-editor
â SASS comes in handy
Hi my name is Rich Tabor
Iâm a theme developer, 7 years, ThemeBeans
Also review themes at ThemeForest
Naomi reached out to me
Iâve been writing, talking and sharing a lot about gutenberg lately â so much that my wife has to ask me if im actually working on everything else. haha
I blog at richtabor.com
Ive been writing a lot lately about gutenberg topics
Gutenberg is not being developed to surpass the competition. Not the primary goal.
Gutenberg aims to provide a content editing experience for the next 5-10 years.
So to understand where themes are headed. We need to look at where they stand today.
X, Avada â all trying to solve isues that WP could not solve,
But they are all doing it differently
Some themes have page building built in
5. If youre not super techinal, you may not have staging servers or local development environments.
6. All these points lead to a disjointed WP XP.
So thatâs where WP themes are today.
Some of you may be thinkingâŠ
That will never ever ever happenâŠ
But it will
For example, contact form 7,
Back to our CF7 example,
Thereâs no need for admin pages or shortcodes. Itâs all there.
If you think about it, widgets are âblocksâ of content already.
Im building a site for a school system.
So now that we understand where shortcodes and widgets are headed. Letâs look at tempates.
Adjusting templates within the editor in the sky
Another cool thing is that folks can build out their templates with blocks.
It makes it so almost anyone can go in and do it.
More facts about templates
Portfolio blocks and plugin example.
How to stop clients from breaking it
You can also lock templates â esp good for clients (all and insert options).
Block templates are still a WIP
Thereâs a lot more potential than just templating out content the way that themes currently do it.
Matias Ventura, the technical lead for the WordPress Gutenberg project mentioned the following on GitHub:
Letâs think about this for a moment.
Block templates will likely push beyond the content âboxâ, becoming whole-page editors.
Headers, footers, what we know as âwidget areasâ â all of it could be set as templates.
Footer block may have nested columns.
Again, this is from the technical lead of the WordPress Gutenberg project. Thatâs a big deal
So after all this talk about page editing...
Say goodbye to custom theme-specific widgets.
And to limiting page templates.
The goal is to get the theme out of the way, and work with Gutenberg to empower users.
To get rid of the hurdles.
The future of WP themes holds well for themes to include blocks
I foresee a future of WordPress themes that tie in companion block plugins which empower users to properly flesh out their ideas.
So what are companion block plugins?
A lot of themes are going to build companion blocks.
If theyâre done right, they can be used outside of the theme as well.
Blocks should really apply objective styles â whereas subjective design choices should be left to the theme.
A lot of chatter has been going on surrounding custom blocks and whether or not they should be included in WordPress themes â or built as separate block plugins.
So, should custom blocks be built into themes?
Nope.
For the exact reasons that shortcodes are generally not supposed to be built into themes. Once you switch a theme, you loose everything.
Now blocks are a bit different⊠(next slide)
The last bit Iâll talk about is styling gutenberg.
When you first fire Gutenberg, itâs subjectively styled.
Heres an example of styling the editor -- and what not to do.
