Superb Effort for a Tough Crowd

We chose to use this theme for a large application (a town and village website engine based in and around the town of Rye in East Sussex, UK) before it was even released with the launch of WordPress v5.9.

As the first default full site editing theme, it was always going to be controversial and badly received because it meant that serious change was afoot and no-one likes change!

Here are the main bones of contention and how we overcame them for our project …

1) Problem: Creating a child theme is difficult
Our Solution: Don’t use a child theme! They really aren’t needed and only serve to slow your site down!

For some reason, everyone thinks that to enact changes to a theme you need to use a child theme.

This is absolutely incorrect.

We have never found a theme modification that can’t be done with a bit of CSS, JavaScript or PHP and the use of a relevant action / filter hook. We do this by creating a custom plugin and it’s much faster because WordPress doesn’t have to fire up two themes to show your site!

It also means that if the theme is updated down the line, you don’t have a child theme to be incompatible with it!

2) Problem: There’s nowhere to add custom PHP
Our Solution: Create a custom plugin and use shortcodes. Simple.

As mentioned above, we create a custom plugin and put all additional code there. It’s tidier and means that your application is theme independent!

So it’s really easy for us to create new shortcodes which can then be used by the Shortcode block or in normal paragraphs in the site editor.

3) Problem: Custom templates are difficult to create / manage / migrate
Our Solution: Duplicate them in the database

OK, so this had us stumped for a bit but in the end we realised that when you edit the theme’s templates, the changes are saved into the posts table of the database. This means that they can be renamed (to your a relevant template in the WordPress template hierarchy) in the database and … BOOM … you can create any template for anything you would in a normal theme. The only difference is that they are stored in the database and not in the theme folder …

… which means …

You don’t need a child theme!!! ??

Admittedly this is not an easy process for proficient users, let alone beginners which is why we developed a plugin to allow these full site editing templates to be easily managed (edit, duplicate, export, import).

4) Problem: Custom CSS can’t be added!
Our Solution: Just go to /wp-admin/customize.php and use the classic “Customizer – Additional CSS” functionality

This one doesn’t really need explaining. Suffice to say that because the Additional CSS functionality is used by all themes that are not Full Site Editing themes, I really don’t think this is going to be depreciated anytime soon ?? You’re safe to use it. Relax.

5) Problem: We need more fonts!
Our Solution: Plugins are your friend!

So we just used the normal font plugin that we always use (“Fonts Plugin | Google Fonts Typography”) and that worked fine for us!

6) Problem: Menus cannot be dynamically modified
Solution: Plugin

A lot of WordPress sites, especially those that have the ability for users to sign in, need to be able to modify the site’s menu on-the-fly so that, for example, signed in users can see a sign out link.

This is usually done by filtering the menu but … because the new menu system uses a new block that doesn’t use classic menus, this is not possible.

To get around this, we just used our SideMenu plugin that already has a shortcode so can be injected into the header template using the Shortcode block.

To sum up … this theme isn’t perfect, there were always going to be teething issues and a huge learning curve for new users but we think it’s a fantastic start and makes it super exciting to imagine what FSE themes might look like in the future!

Well done team Twenty Twenty-Two!!