Full Site Editing With WordPress Twenty Twenty-Four

As I had mentioned in my inaugural post, I’ve recently been involved in WordPress again for the first time in a few years. Most of my previous theme work has been fairly pedestrian. For basically all of my previous sites I would simply design it to match the Dracula theme and call things complete from there. I even created a Dracula theme for Write.as when I gave that platform a shot.

As people who have been through the ringer with WordPress know, each year the team behind the platform releases a new “official” theme. To keep things simple, they’re just named after the current year, e.g. Twenty Nineteen. Those were always some of my favorite themes to swap to since they:

1. Were guaranteed to leverage whatever new WordPress features came around.
2. Would remain updated for quite a while.
3. Were unlikely to try to upsell me on anything.
4. Gave me something new to play with every year.

Plenty of 3rd party WordPress themes have a ton of great features and design, but there was always some element of “how long will this be updated” and/or “I’m super tired of it trying to convince me to buy a ‘premium’ version.” I also didn’t usually need more than the official themes as I’ve been able to easily enough make the style changes above with some combination of simple theme edits and CSS changes, so I was content.

Starting with the Twenty Twenty-Two theme, however, the editing experience became quite different as it introduced the new Full Site Editing experience. This dramatically changed how sites were modified and heavily discouraged the types of CSS changes I would typically make. On one hand this made a lot of sense since it basically encouraged people to manage their sites, templates, etc. through the same interface with which they were now creating new posts. It also saved people from modifying 3rd party themes by using browser tools to inspect elements so they could figure out which CSS to even override. On the other hand, many aspects of how to get a site to look the way they wanted were extremely opaque, especially for WordPress veterans. Some of the minute details on how to make things look just right or the reason why a particular element would be positioned quite like it was would seem impossible to determine without going back to the aforementioned browser tools.

Note: I’m definitely not a WordPress veteran, but having chatted about this with a handful of people who are, that’s definitely the vibe I’m getting from them.

When I recently designed a new site for my partner’s business, I initially tried to use the Twenty Twenty-Three theme that continues the FSE experience and quickly became frustrated at how difficult it was to pull off what I wanted to do. Admittedly, it was a bit out of my comfort zone since designing a professional site is a much different experience with much different requirements from designing a personal site or blog. Regardless, I almost ditched the idea of using WordPress entirely before I decided to try a different theme. Blocksy ended up giving me a solid template that got me where I needed to be without too much pain, so the site ended up sticking with WordPress.

When that site was updated to WordPress 6.4, however, and I saw that the Twenty Twenty-Four theme had been released, I knew I wanted to check it out. Since I had been kicking around the idea of this site already, it seemed like the perfect opportunity. After snagging a subscription for an additional site from my WordPress host, I decided to hop in.

On the whole, the FSE experience still feels opaque to me. While it should be more straightforward in theory than how I’ve traditionally modified WordPress sites, I still find it more difficult. The good news, however, is that so many of the theme’s defaults are sensible to me. In the Twenty Twenty-Two theme, for example, I was struggling to figure out how to reliably adjust the width of various elements of my site. With Twenty Twenty-Four, I haven’t had the same struggle simply because I’ve been happy with the default values. I don’t know if that’s exactly a glowing review of the FSE experience, but it is a nice touch for the theme itself.

I’ve found that things like managing patterns in the site like my header and footer to be quite simple, and it was even easier to disconnect my navigation menu so that I could customize it to my liking than it was with Blocksy. On the whole, I’ve been happy with Twenty Twenty-Four, but the fact of the matter is that I just haven’t really changed much with it. The current version of the site when this post is published is an almost stock version of the template with only some minor tweaks. Hell, even the default colors that are very white, black, and brown-centric are almost exactly what I was looking for, so even those I didn’t do very much with.

I think over time I’ll continue to play with theme to see what I like, what I don’t and gain some more experience with FSE in WordPress. If history is any indication, I’ll be messing with this for the next 11 months or so and finally have things exactly how I want them just in time for the Twenty Twenty-Five theme to come out… and my inner geek won’t be able to help himself from trying out the shiny new thing.