Do i need to replace old Footer menus with block widgets?

Hi @prmyapps

Let me try and help out here.

My website is on WP 5.8.1 and I wanted to try the new blocks that come with FSE, but I am confused.

It’s great that you are trying this out!

I have been using top, sidebar and footer menus forever, but it seems like those will be going away?

These aren’t going away but the way WordPress handles the concept of “navigations” will evolve over time.

WordPress will continue to support the concept of “menus”, but the paradigm will ultimately be block based. So you will create them via the Navigation block.

However, this isn’t ready yet so you can continue to create Menus using the existing screen and the wp_nav_menu() function.

Is there any overview documentation to tell a non-developer what elements in the user interface that they need to migrate to the block and widget structure?

As you know Widgets have been a feature of WordPress for a long time. The change that happened in 5.8 was that Widgets became “block based”. You now create and manage Widgets using blocks which provides a lot more flexibility due to the composability of blocks.

You can still use register_sidebar() in your Theme to register Widgetised areas and these will then show up in the Widgets screen in WPAdmin.

Am I supposed to migrate my old Footer menu to these new Footer Widgets? Why aren’t there Header Widgets? I feel like I am missing a simple concept here…

You don’t need to migrate your menus to Widgets or anything like that unless you choose to do so.

The Navigation block may land in WordPress 5.9 (no guarantees!) but that will not change the way you build menus in classic Themes (ie: any Theme that is not a full block based Theme).

So basically you don’t need to worry for now unless you are using the Site Editor and block based themes which I don’t think you are (feel free to correct me).

Am I supposed to install the Gutenberg plug-in…

The Gutenberg Plugin can be installed to provide you access to features of Gutenberg that are not yet merged into WordPress core. However it comes with some risk of instability and so you should be prepared to be quite “hands on” if you want to run this on a Production website. Feel free to experiment with it in a safe environment however – it provides a great insight into the power you can expect in WordPress very soon.

…[in] order to see other widgets besides the footers

No – Widgets are not determined by the Gutenberg Plugin. Widget areas are created via calling register_sidebar in your Theme’s PHP code.

Can the Gutenberg plug-in be used on a production site or is it just for beta testing?

See my response above. If you are still getting familiar with Gutenberg and FSE then I’d suggest perhaps only using it for testing and not on a Production site.

Thank you for your help and sorry for the stupid questions.

Not at all. All great questions and perfectly reasonable. I hope I was able to help?

If not, feel free to drop some more questions and I’ll respond when I can.

All the very best

Hello @get_dave,
Thanks for the very lengthy reply. By the time I saw it, I had already made all the changes that I could within the current FSE. I continued to use Twenty-Twenty’s top menu and footer menus, and I guess I will migrate them to block-based after the Navigation block arrives and documentation is more abundant.

It was a little tricky to figure out how to use the Query Loop, but I managed. I was only able to use Query Loop for specific categories, but hopefully there will be an easier way to do this in the future. I would like to use a Query Loop block layout as a default for all Category and Tag views and the Search Result. Hopefully that’s in the works.

Thank you again for your time and all you are doing for the WP community.
Cheers,
-mj lee