From the course: Building a Small Business Website with WordPress.com

Overview of full site editing - WordPress Tutorial

From the course: Building a Small Business Website with WordPress.com

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Overview of full site editing

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- [Instructor] The WordPress editing experience has changed quite a bit 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working with WordPress for a while, you know that the Classic Editor, which operated similarly to a word processor has been replaced by the Block Editor, also known as Gutenberg.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 posts, paragraph blocks, image blocks, rows and 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 those features. Let me show you. So here in my WordPress Admin, I'm under Appearance, Themes, and I've got this theme called Shoreditch. This is not a full site editing theme but I'm going to search for a theme that is, the Twenty Twenty-Two theme. And I'm going to go ahead and activate it. I'll just say activate the theme. And once that's done, you can see that I get this new option in the menu here called Editor, and it's got this beta label. Allow me to be honest and opinionated here. Full site editing is really cool in concept. I like the way that this is heading. However, it's obviously still in beta and some would argue it shouldn't even be a part of 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 So I'm hesitant to show a lot of screen shots because they'd probably be outdated pretty quickly anyway. What does this mean for you as a WordPress.com 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 full site editing themes, consider block-based or hybrid themes. These are themes that are optimized for the Block Editor but aren't built for full site editing. While I'm not going to teach you about full site editing in this course, I wanted to mention it as it is something that you may run into as you work with WordPress.

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