The debut of the “full site editor” in WordPress 5.8 has led to rapid iteration on theme development options and best practices over the last four years. The best practices of building custom themes were subverted with the release of Gutenberg at the end of 2017 and were further upended as the fundamental underlying structure of WordPress shifted dramatically again when the full site editor was released in 2021. As such, WordPress theming continues to undergo a period of rapid innovation and reinvention.
I started building themes with Gutenberg immediately upon its release into WordPress core and also started building Full Site Editing (FSE) themes upon their release. There were a handful of resources available early on to help guide me in terms of standards for developing with these new tools, but a significant amount of experimentation, refining my process with each new website build, and intensive study of other people’s themes helped me come to a new process for theme building that has become nearly as comfortable as the pre-2018 .
In this talk we’ll review my current FSE process for building a custom theme. We’ll cover base themes; shifts in tooling, process, and workflow; how to decide when to use the editor versus code a component; using blocks for page structure instead of traditional templating, how to set a website editor up for success when managing a site built with an FSE theme, and more.