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

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

• "Building Custom Gutenberg Blocks: The Definitive Block Development Tutorial", tutorial by Carlo Daniele

Full-Site Editing

• Full site editing for theme developers, course by Carolina Nymark
• "A Deep Introduction to WordPress Block Themes", tutorial by Ganesh Dahal

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.

• You Don't Know JS: ES6 & Beyond, book by Kyle Simpson.
• JavaScript Everywhere: Building Cross-Platform Applications with GraphQL, React, React Native, and Electron, book by Adam D. Scrott
• Modern React with Redux, course by Stephen Girder