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As WordPress blocks—and therefore patterns—continue to expand in scope, the need for a simplified editing experience is more present than ever. Sure, the new tooling is nice — like fluid typography, new spacing controls, element hover color support, padding, layout, etc — but it’s also quite a lot to take in.
Cue the new template locking mechanism for making only content blocks (text and images) editable within a pattern, landing in the upcoming WordPress 6.1 release.
Last year I shared a piece on fluid typography, in particular on adopting a fluid type scale within WordPress block themes, using the CSS clamp() function. The method I experimented with is interesting in that it uses a type scale, then calculates the fluid type values for each font size within the theme’s theme.json file.
Introducing Wei. Tell your story and share your thoughts with a minimal WordPress block theme, inspired by pure simplicity. Embracing clean type, beautifully bold color schemes, and color-matched featured images, Wei puts your words first — in a delightful and creative fashion.
Wei is a stripped down, minimalistic block theme with a single column layout. It gives a lot, and asks for little in return.
Style variations are a new feature of block themes, recently landing in WordPress 6.0. They’re just one part of the new era of WordPress theming that we’re looking at, with the introduction of Full Site Editing. These style variations are alternate design pre-sets for a theme, enabling you to quickly apply a new look and feel to your site—all within a single theme. Too good to be true? Actually, no.
We all knew the landscape of WordPress themes was shifting with the introduction of Gutenberg. What we didn’t know, was by how much.
With the arrival of the anticipated Full Site Editing experience into WordPress 5.9, themes are starting to look very different.
This new class of block-based WordPress themes arguably introduces the biggest change to themes, since well… themes existed. These themes are built entirely with blocks. That is, the headers, footers, blogroll, and page templates — literally every aspect of the theme. If it’s on the page, it’s a block.
It’s long overdue, but I’ve recently set up a richtabor/blocks repository on Github that links to the source code for the WordPress blocks that I currently have published — including a few that are yet to be available on WordPress.org.
Every single block I’ve added, I built out of a need of my own. I wanted to be able to add a simple publishing checklist to posts, so I created the Todo List block. And I like to leave editor notes throughout my posts with the Markdown comment block, so I don’t forget things.
Share your authentic self with Wabi, a WordPress block theme designed to help you tell your story best. Wabi foregrounds the simplistic design language of storytelling through clean lines, beautiful typography and a dynamic accent color system — making it a brilliant theme for writers and publishers.
I am stoked to announce that the Login Designer WordPress plugin has joined the WP Experts family. I can’t think of a better group of folks to continue driving the innovative front that is Login Designer.
TLDR; I built a generative art flow that is fully autonomous: generating art daily from creative code, and publishing to Instagram and WordPress without any humans. Cool, eh?
I’ve long been a huge fan of block patterns. So much that I see patterns becoming the primary method most of us lay out pages within the block editor. And with the recent release of Gutenberg, and upcoming release of WordPress 5.9, patterns are getting a lot of attention. There are a number of Pattern API improvements on the way, but one I am most interested in, is the addition of the Pattern block.
I’m a big fan of the CSS clamp() function and how it allows for behavior previously only possible with media queries. The clamp() function takes three parameters: a minimum value, a preferred value, and a maximum allowed value — resulting in a value between each of those.
And while clamp() may be used in a bunch of ways, my favorite use is certainly for fluid typography.
Do you publish online? If so, this one is for you.
I’ll show you how I created a publishing checklist that is automatically added to the top of every post I draft, to ensure I follow my publishing workflow. This way, before I hit that ominous blue publish button, I know if each publishing task is properly accounted for.
This is part one, of three, in a series on standardizing how we build this next generation of WordPress block themes to accompany the Full Site Editing effort. If you like this, read on about standardizing font sizes, and standardizing site spacing. Each of these are what I would consider design foundations of a website, of which should be functionally standardized.
This is part two, of three, in a series on standardizing how we build this next generation of WordPress block themes to accompany the Full Site Editing effort.
If you like this article on font sizes, read on about standardizing color slugs, and standardizing site spacing. Each of these are what I would consider core design tenets of a website, of which should be functionally standardized. By standardizing a few entries within a WordPress theme’s theme.json file, we can finally create a class of themes that truly are interchangeable. Interchangeable in function, while remaining distinct in style.
Here’s a take on why this is important, and how weget there.
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