From the course: Building a Small Business Website with Open Source WordPress

Overview of Full Site Editing - WordPress Tutorial

From the course: Building a Small Business Website with Open Source WordPress

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Overview of Full Site Editing

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- [Instructor] The WordPress editing experience has changed significantly in recent years. If you've been working with WordPress for a while, you know that the classic editor, which operated similarly to a word processor, has been replaced by the Block Editor, also known as Gutenberg. Since the block editor was introduced in late 2018, we've used blocks to create and lay out pages and post. Paragraph blocks, image blocks, roadblocks, column blocks. This is how we create content. Now take this concept a step further and imagine using blocks to create things outside of the content area, things like your site header or site footer. Essentially using blocks to create your entire site. It's called full site editing. Using full site editing requires a special type of theme that supports these features, and these are called block themes. Now, when you're using a block theme, you get access to something called the site editor. Let me show you. So if I head to my WordPress dashboard and go to Appearance, Themes, right now I've got the 2020 theme active. I'm going to activate 2022, which is a block theme. And here under my appearance menu, I now get this editor. Now at the time of this recording, this is still in beta, and it's indicated by this beta label here. Allow me to be honest and a little bit opinionated here. Full site editing is really cool in concept. I like the way this is heading. However, it's obviously still in beta, and some would argue that it shouldn't even be in WordPress yet until it's further along in development. Because it's so new, there's still a lot of fluctuation. It's quite literally evolving by the day. So I'm hesitating to show a lot of screenshots here, because they'd probably be outdated pretty quickly anyway. What does this mean for you as a WordPress user and website owner? Well, there's a steep learning curve with full-site editing, and unless you just love being on the bleeding edge, I'd recommend giving this feature a little more time to bake. In the meantime, instead of block themes, consider block-based themes. These are themes that are optimized for the block editor but are not built for full-site editing. We'll look at some examples of block-based themes later in the course. So while I'm not going to teach you about full-site editing in this course, I wanted to mention it as something that you may run into as you work with WordPress. If you're really interested in a more in-depth look, check out this course in the library.

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