Destination Full-Site Editing: All the Steps Monmouth University Took to Prepare for the Future of WordPress

Date: Thursday, July 13, 2023
Time: 5:00 - 5:45 pm (CDT) (UTC-05:00)
Location: Room 2
Format: General Lecture Session

Who is this session for?

Web developers who design plugins and themes for their institutions.

Session description

Full-Site Editing (FSE) is a powerful expansion of WordPress’s baked-in toolkit. The new features that constitute FSE allow editors to lay out their entire website—including templates for pages, archives, and custom posts—with no coding required. Yet despite how easy it is to use FSE, coding a theme that takes full-advantage of it presents a slew of obstacles—especially for developers acquainted with standard Classic themes.

Without realizing it, Monmouth University’s web team overcame many of these challenges early on. By gradually integrating other new WordPress features, they discovered and grasped the necessary quirks for building an FSE theme—on top of broadening their programming skillset. This presentation will outline their process step-by-step to show other teams a path toward the Full Site Editing experience.

Key takeaways

  • Developers should approach new WordPress features as an opportunity to not only modernize the site but their programming repertoire.
  • By steadily adopting new features and embracing a hybrid Classic/FSE model, developers can update their site piece-by-piece and determine how far they should to go.
  • Learning the ins-and-outs of the Block Editor and the Block API will take time, but this process is necessary for taking full advantage of FSE.

Github repo

Block Environment Plugin:  https://github.com/SJGraboski/block-environment-plugins

Post-Session: Recommended Tutorials, Books, and Courses

Block Building

Full-Site Editing

ES6 and React

To take advantage of WordPress Blocks, you will need some familiarity with ES6 and React. Steve personally found the following sources helpful.

Presenter

Steve Graboski

Headshot of Steve Graboski
Full-Stack Developer, Monmouth University

Steve Graboski is a full-stack developer for Monmouth University’s Marketing & Communications department. A professional programmer with more than a decade of WordPress experience, Steve’s coding interests center around modern JavaScript and React.

Sessions

  • General Lecture Session: Destination Full-Site Editing: All the Steps Monmouth University Took to Prepare for the Future of WordPress

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