Gutenberg & Themes

There’s been a few interesting conversations about Gutenberg in the context of what the future of WordPress may look like. Given the fact we are starting from the bottom up with the post and page editor, and not yet directly tackling wider theme or customization implications, I thought it could be useful to record a real video of what GutenbergGutenberg The Gutenberg project is the new Editor Interface for WordPress. The editor improves the process and experience of creating new content, making writing rich content much simpler. It uses ‘blocks’ to add richness rather than shortcodes, custom HTML etc. https://wordpress.org/gutenberg/ is capable of doing at the moment—which hopefully better illustrates what it could do in the future after the post and page editing milestone.

Here’s a simple theme that integrates with Gutenberg in the following ways:

  • Defines specific styles for blocks.
  • Loads the theme styles within the Gutenberg editor.
  • Produces a WYSIWYGWhat You See Is What You Get What You See Is What You Get. Most commonly used in relation to editors, where changes made in edit mode reflect exactly as they will translate to the published page. experience of true direct manipulation that remains fast and optimized for editing.

The above video starts from a blank state, but it could just as well start with blocks already in place—templates and guides—waiting for the user to fill in the blanks and guiding them through the process:

These are quickly put together, but I hope it shows how things can progress even with very straightforward theme integration. As soon as we expand the scope and include more blocks (site title, site headerHeader The header of your site is typically the first thing people will experience. The masthead or header art located across the top of your page is part of the look and feel of your website. It can influence a visitor’s opinion about your content and you/ your organization’s brand. It may also look different on different screen sizes., menus, more 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.

#gutenberg