The template editor in WordPress 5.8 was the first hint for Editing a Website on WordPress was coming. And now, with the latest version of WordPress, 5.9, you can fully experience all of this major update.
Let’s learn a bit about Editing a Website on WordPress before we start learning about the new changes that come with full site editing;
1. What is Full Site Editing in WordPress?
Blocks are the main way for Editing a Website on WordPress. Before, blocks were used to change the site’s content area. With full site editing, every part of your website will be treated like a block. Users can now work with both global and page elements on a single interface thanks to this major update. Also, it has added new tools for developers and a new file for setting up themes.
Once you update WordPress to version 5.9, you’ll have to turn on a full site editing theme, like Twenty Twenty-Two. After that, you can use only Gutenberg blocks to build a whole website.
2. Try the Latest Version of WordPress
Our super-fast managed hosting will help you get your WordPress 5.9 site up and running.
How does editing your whole site help you?
With Editing a Website on WordPress, it is now easier than ever to build and design a WordPress site. You can change anything on the page and define the global elements with the same editor.
3. What are global elements?
When they are assigned, global elements are the elements, containers, and columns that can be used on your whole website.
This new way saves time because you can make changes to the whole website or just one page. During editing, you can see all the live changes, so you don’t have to switch between editors to keep track of them.
So, your website design gets better as you work on both the global and page levels at the same time.
- How to make WordPress 5.9 allow full site editing?
Editing a Website on WordPress isn’t turned on by default for WordPress 5.9. You can turn on the functionality, though, by following the simple steps below:
Note: If you’re using a version of WordPress older than 5.9, you’ll need to update it first and then activate an FSE theme to use the full site editing feature.
- Go to the dashboard of your site.
You will see the version and theme of WordPress you are using right now.
- Turn on Editing a Website on WordPress – WordPress Dashboard
- We’re using the “Twenty Twenty-One” theme, as the picture above shows, so we’ll have to change it.
- Click on “Look” and then “Themes.”
- Click on topics
- Find the “Twenty Twenty-Two” theme or any other FSE theme and click “Activate” on it.
- Put Twenty Twenty-Two to work
- Once it’s turned on, you can click “Appearance” to see a new “Editor” option.
- Choose Editor.
- click editor
- There you go, you can now change everything on your site. Start moving the blocks around and making your website.
- Editing a Website on WordPress is turned on.
4. What’s New with Editing a Full Site in WordPress?
Full site editing has made it easier to build and design a WordPress site. Users can now build a website from scratch without having to add any lines of code.
It lets you create, preview, and change templates with its site editor. You can use the style interface to choose the default styles and the blocks to build your whole site. And there’s more, so let’s find out about the new changes the Editing a Website on WordPress has made.
- Making a site
With full site editing, as we’ve already said, every part of a page or template is treated as a block. You can use single templates or parts of templates to build a page.
- Making a site on a full site editor
In the new site editor, you can also make, change, and preview templates and template parts. You can also find the list of templates:
FSE Templates
- Customizer & Widget Menu Links
When you turn on the Editing a Website on WordPress theme, the customizer and widgets will disappear from the Appearance tab in the WordPress dashboard.
- Customizer & Widget Menu Links
This happens because the full site editing theme is only based on blocks, so the customizer and widgets tabs are hidden. But if you turn on any plugin that uses a customizer, you can make them show up again.
- Fonts and colors by default
In the top right corner of the screen, the site editor adds a new sidebar panel called Styles. When you click on it, you can change the font, colors, and layout.
- Fonts and colors by default
You can change how blocks and your whole site look by using the “blocks” option in the “styles” tab. In blocks, you can add things like paragraphs, pictures, headings, buttons, lists, and so on.
5. What’s New for Authors of Themes?
Before FSE, a WordPress theme was coded using PHP. Now they can put more of their attention on HTML and block markup.
Block patterns and global styles are more important than the customizer when it comes to designing.
- Block Patterns
Block patterns are groups of parts or “blocks” that make a layout that can be used again and again. Also, FSE has a pattern explorer that lets you look at patterns and use them in your content by putting them in blocks. This lets you put more than one copy of a pattern on any page and change each one.
Also, the pattern explorer doesn’t limit you to the theme patterns on your site; you can choose any pattern from the WordPress repository pattern library.
- FSE Block Patterns
Block patterns are helpful for theme developers because the font and color options are controlled by “Styles.” This makes it easier to make patterns without having to use code in the customizer.
6. How to make the block patterns and register them
You should decide what your block will be used for before you start making the pattern. Would it be a section about the form, the features, or the hero? Once you’ve decided, you can make a pattern by putting the blocks together in the editor. Lastly, register the block pattern by using the block markup as a value.
With an init hook and the PHP function register block pattern, you can register the block patterns. Here are the steps to take:
- Make a folder called Patterns in your theme.
- Make the PHP file and put the code below in it:
- function prefix_block_pattern() {
- register_block_pattern( … );
- add_action( ‘init’, ‘prefix_block_pattern’ );
- Include this file in your functions.php.
- Should You Use Block Patterns’ Default Content?
Users like demo content that they can replace with their own, which makes the process easier. Add demo images to “notify users” so that they know what to do. Since the images are stored locally in the theme, if a user changes the theme, the demo images will be lost.
Read the detailed documentation from the WordPress training team to learn more about how to make patterns.
- Theme Blocks
Before FSE, the templates in the block editor were used to decide where to put elements. But with the Editing a Website on WordPress, you can add all of these things and decide where they go by using theme blocks.
- FSE Theme Blocks
You can control the layout of a page by using theme blocks. This gives you more freedom than what your theme and its templates give you. FSE goes one step further than this by letting you use different theme elements on different pages.
You can also combine the block editor and the theme blocks to make custom templates and have full control over how people access your site’s content.
- Reactivate & Update Plugins
Plugins make it easier for developers to make quick changes and improve the user experience. Almost every responsive and easy-to-use WordPress site has some plugins to back it up. But these plugins need to be updated every time WordPress is updated, because some versions of WordPress might not support them.
- FSE Reactivate & Update Plugins
The best thing to do is to check your list of plugins on a regular basis to see which ones need to be updated. With FSE, you will need to check your list of plugins to see if any of them aren’t compatible or need to be updated.
For a problem-free experience, you may also need to turn on some plugins that you turned off.
- Templates
Templates are layouts with block patterns, attributes, etc., and they used to be part of the theme files for Editing a Website on WordPress. In earlier versions of WordPress, they were usually PHP files with some HTML in them.
- FSE Templates
But with FSE, these template files are not HTML files that contain the block markup. Now, they have the content area and template parts, and they can also be used in other templates.
7. How to Use the Full Site Editor to Build Themes
With the Editing a Website on WordPress, it is now easier than ever to build themes. You can make your own layouts in the site editor by using different blocks and patterns.
- Once your design is finished, you can save it as a.zip file.
- Follow the steps below to make changes to and export your theme.
- Go to the Dashboard for WordPress.
- Click on Look > Editor
- You can change the theme to fit your needs.
- Click the three dots in the upper right corner of your screen.
- When you click Export, your theme will be saved as a zipped file.
Bottom Line:
Editing a Website on WordPress can be a cumbersome process if you are unaware of the skills required. We hope you have received important insights from the above blog and learned to editing a web site on WordPress. It will result into attracting more traffic to your website.
