Twenty Twenty-two

This site is now using a “Full Site Editing” theme, Twenty Twenty-two. Full site editing is in many ways a whole new thing. The advertised virtues (and in my view they are virtues) is that these themes used blocks everywhere. You can put blocks in the headers, footers, sidebars… And there really is no longer any difference between widgets and blocks; widgets are just a kind of block with a lot of built-in functionality. You can put widgets anywhere you used to put blocks. Basically, widgets are being deprecated, just the same way the “classic editor” is being deprecated. Both are being kept around as “blocks” for, presumably, legacy purposes.

This emphasis on building with blocks is great, but some of the documentation and many many plugins are not ready for it. So plugins must be selected with care. There is a lot to relearn in terms of styling (some of which is still a little glitchy) and navigation (the use of the built-in navigation block is currently very badly documented). There are a few features that came with standard themes (like breadcrumbs) that are missing for now; I had to activate the SEO plugin Yoast to get breadcrumbs.

On the other hand, I really like the templating approach to obtaiing consistent styles across the site. You can now do a lot of things easily for which you used to have to use a third-party builder like Elementor or Beaver Build. (They too are still around, but I didn’t like them before and I’m not going to start using them now.)