Steve Grant

I know this is slight tangential but I really wish there was a different approach to the redevelopment. I wish they’d finish one part off before starting another massive upheaval.

Currently we are in a transition toward FSE and new kind of template system, which will be great when it’s finished but lets be honest no developer with a big client site going Live in the next month has built it with a FSE theme. It’s not “there” yet.

So – We create a site in August 2021 and deliver the site 1st November 2021. It uses PHP templates, because FSE and Gutenberg menus are in flux.

We educate our clients to use Gutenberg to lay out their posts (rather than pasting tables in from Word Docs!) and we show them the Group and Column features and we say “please use this to put your picture in a block with text”. And the client tries it, and they ask questions like ” how di I increase the gaps between columns, I can see padding but not MARGIN”

So we developers to try to explain:
“well, that requires the new theme WP system to activate both margin and padding in Gutenberg – and theme.JSON is needed to activate the option, and we tried incorporating theme.JSON but it is not compatible with your theme because theme.JSON takes precedence over the … well, let’s just say it broke everything, it’s all in flux right now but WP team are apparently going to nail it by November this year at which point we can start to fix your new site….”

And the client says “why doesn’t wordpress ever work simply, can’t we use something else?”.

And we developers say “Oh it will work eventually, it will be AMAZING one day. And some good news – before they get the editor issues resolved they have already started changing how you will update menus, and styles, and layouts too”

And the client says “That sounds like more confusion and problems!! So when will that happen, surely that’s years away … will it work OK on our site?”

and we say “In November 2021 everything I did in September 2021 will become incompatible, or legacy, and there will be more forks and bug chasing – and no it will not work”

And the client says “but why didn’t you build the site in FSE / Theme.JSON in September” and we say “because as I looked at the development state of FSE I began contemplating a new life as a wood carver, deep in the forest. A good honest reliable job, something with material continuity, reliability, stability “

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