davidbisset.social

The block theme ecosystem isn’t very impressive or exciting at the moment. Although there are some good block themes on .org (mostly by Automattic and core), they often leave a lot to be desired. Clicking through some of the demos, some of them look broken, some of them look worse than classic WordPress themes. Right now, there aren’t many incentives to creating block themes as a theme distributor — they are a lot of work (for now), there aren’t many people using them (for now), and there’s not a lucrative ecosystem around them (for now). That may change, but even several years into this transition, it’s still been tough to get widespread buy-in, and there are plenty of reasons why. Unlike classic themes which might be 70% code and 30% design, block themes are like 80% design and 20% code since most of theme creation happens in the editor. This is a tension for an ecosystem historically comprised largely of PHP devs that haven’t really prioritized design (or learned some JavaScript yet?). To create these block themes, you need a good design eye, patience to work with all of these new tools, settings, styles, and content types (patterns, template parts, etc.), and the knowledge to answer the support questions that come from this new stuff. When I look at the pool of theme creators, I’m not sure there’s a lot of folks who are super interested in all of that (and doing it for free, of course). continues...

(https://phpc.social/@davidbisset/112319520899608684)

Thoughts from Mike McAlister on "why #WordPress block themes aren't taking off"

https://twitter.com/mikemcalister/status/1782569496042938587

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David Bisset

Hashtags: 039, wordpress