Maybe the worst WordPress theme yet

Hi @palliso13, thank you for your feedback.

it arbitrarily added elements to my site without my approval

Could you please elaborate on this? What elements have been added? If you could share a direct link or a link to a screenshot, that’d help a lot!

there’s no way to change the layout, colors or fonts. Basically, it’s useless.

It should be possible to customize the appearance of the theme. Did you have the chance to check this thread with various resources? https://www.ads-software.com/support/topic/support-resources-for-twenty-twenty-three

If the above does not help, could you please provide a concrete example of something you are unable to customize?

Thank you!

I’ve already deleted it and gone back to my old theme so I can’t share any screenshots. But it added a giant header to the top of my page that said something about it being a blog about philosophy and a garish green button to the bottom of my page and I was unable to get rid of them.

It removed the menu I had on the previous version of my site and added a list of created pages instead that I wasn’t able to edit or change at all.

It’s not obvious how to make changes/edits. You basically have to make the site live before you can see the Customizer which kind of defeats the purpose of being able to see how changes will look before you implement them.

When I did finally find the Customizer to try to make changes, there were basically no options. My current theme has many options where I can change the look/design of the site, add menus, widgets, etc… That doesn’t appear to be possible with 2023.

ETA: It showed my three most recent posts but there was no option to show fewer or more. There also didn’t seem to be any working navigation. When I tried to click on one of the posts, for example, the link didn’t work.

• This reply was modified 2 years ago by palliso13.
• This reply was modified 2 years ago by palliso13.

2023 is a block theme so everything gets done in the site-editor, not the customizer. Same with menus. They’re created in the site-editor, not nav-menus.php page and the same with widgets.

It’s an entirely new way of doing things and WordPress hasn’t gotten the word out very well. Everything is a block.

It’s actually quite flexible as you can now create multiple headers, footer and sidebars, even on themes that don’t come with sidebars. Then you can display any of those template parts when/where you choose.

2022 is also a FSE capable block theme. FSE = Full Site Editing. Technically still in Beta.

So basically instead of it being a theme that provides a framework that I can work with, I basically have to figure out how to create everything myself… in a theme that doesn’t seem to let you actually make any changes?

I hear you @palliso13 ?? Block themes have huge potential but they require re-learning a few things. I would recommend this course:
https://learn.www.ads-software.com/course/a-developers-guide-to-block-themes-part-1/

@palliso13 it can be confusing but if you treat ALL sections in your page as content, it is basically a no-code solution for customizing your theme without limits.
only thing you should know that there are no more widgets (no need for them), because you can compose every component with blocks, and you should use /wp-admin/site-editor.php (Appearance > Editor) for this.
not everyone’s cup of tea, but it has possibilities and in the future it will be quite mainstream, so it is worth learning it.
especially because if you look at the code, there is almost no php anymore in the theme, which is a very good direction IMO, php is plugin territory.

@mistersippi How can you predict something will become mainstream? It is a ridiculous notion that people should have to relearn everything without any proper official guides. It breaks all of the past tutorials, it breaks people’s sites, and it makes people have to redesign their sites from the ground up on new design philosophies. It only becomes worth learning when it becomes mainstream, not because you want it to be mainstream. I’m currently banging my head right now because of the severe lack of documentation and guides on how to do anything. Everything I have found has been based on themes that aren’t ‘block’ based. I have no way of learning WordPress in it’s current state because of this.

Hi, @rpgrogan I can imagine how hard it is to find the resources considering most tutorials are for the old theme structure, if you’d rather stick to the previous theme structure older themes such as Twenty Twenty One can offer that and are still being maintained.

For the new block theme, we have a few resources that can be useful:

• This article explains the TT3 theme and how to use it.
• The theme uses Full Site Editing, which is explained in detail in this article.