#185 – Mary Ann Aschenbrenner on Switching Clients From Classic to Block Themes

Transcript

[00:00:19] Nathan Wrigley: Welcome to the Jukebox podcast from WP Tavern. My name is Nathan Wrigley.

Jukebox is a podcast which is dedicated to all things WordPress. The people, the events, the plugins, the blocks, the themes, and in this case, switching clients from classic to block themes.

If you’d like to subscribe to the podcast, you can do that by searching for WP Tavern in your podcast, player of choice. Or by going to wptavern.com/feed/podcast, and you can copy that URL into most podcast players.

If you have a topic that you’d like us to feature on the podcast, I’m keen to hear from you and hopefully get you, or your idea, featured on the show. Head to wptavern.com/contact/jukebox, and use the form there.

So on the podcast today we have Mary Ann Aschenbrenner. Mary Ann has been the president of Waterlink Web, a digital agency specializing in WordPress web design, since 2014. Her experience includes e-commerce and membership websites, websites for local nonprofit organizations, and starter websites for small businesses As a lifelong learner, Mary Ann likes to keep pace with the latest innovations in WordPress. She is a fan of block themes, and particularly the WordPress default themes.

We start by discussing the differences between classic and block themes, with Mary Ann offering practical step-by-step advice for anyone considering a move from a classic theme to a modern block-based theme. She talks about why you might want to make the switch, potential challenges to look out for, and stories from her own experience converting client sites.

We also chat about the evolution of WordPress, the diminishing need for third party page builders, the importance of client education, and the ongoing improvements in the block editor. Plus Mary Ann shares insights from her WordCamp presentation, and her experiences collaborating with the WordPress community.

Whether you’re a seasoned WordPresser or just starting out and keen to know how block themes are making site building more accessible for everyone, this episode is for you.

If you’re interested in finding out more, you can find all of the links in the show notes by heading to wptavern.com/podcast, where you’ll find all the other episodes as well.

And so without further delay, I bring you Mary Ann Aschenbrenner.

I am joined on the podcast by Mary Ann Aschenbrenner. Hello.

[00:02:54] Mary Ann Aschenbrenner: Hello. Nice to be here.

[00:02:56] Nathan Wrigley: Very nice to have you with us. Thank you so much. You are the first interview that I’m carrying out at WordCamp US in Portland in the year 2025.

The endeavour here is to talk about classic themes and block themes. You are doing a presentation. I don’t suppose you’ve done it yet, because we’re right at the beginning of the main conference.

[00:03:12] Mary Ann Aschenbrenner: I do it this afternoon at 2:15pm, yes.

[00:03:15] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. Good luck with that. Let’s just first of all find out a little bit about you. So if you don’t mind, would you just give us your biography, your potted biography, if you like. Who you are, what you do.

[00:03:24] Mary Ann Aschenbrenner: I’m from Portland, born and raised here. And the reason I got into website design is kind of a fluke and kind of really related to my whole ethos as a citizen of this great city.

Well, Pier Park is a North Portland park and it’s where my kids learned to swim. It’s where a lot of kids learned to swim. It was in a fairly low income neighborhood. And in 2005, the City of Portland decided to close the outdoor pool that was open in the summers. Just funding issues. And I worked with some other North Portland people and we gathered 700 signatures, which I don’t know if you know this, it’s a lot of work to get 700 signatures. And we took them down to City Hall, and we presented them and we talked about why Pier Pool needed to stay open.

And Sam Adams at the time said, we can find money for these folks. He was on the city council. And lo and behold, they decided to keep Pier Pool open.

Well, about a month later, I’m at a City Bureau meeting and was told that the reason they decided to close Pier Pool at the time, instead of Buckman Pool was because Buckman had a website. This was 2000 and five. I was like, oh, it can’t be that hard to get a website. I’ve collected 700 signatures, websites have to be easier. So Friends of Pier Park has had a website ever since and we, of course, keep our pool open with it. And that’s the long story short of how I got into it.

[00:04:58] Nathan Wrigley: That’s nice. That’s a real sort of philanthropic community endeavour that got you started on the road to WordPress. I’m guessing you built that site with WordPress.

[00:05:05] Mary Ann Aschenbrenner: I got someone else to do it because I knew nothing about building websites. In 2012, I had the opportunity to go back to school, and I actually went to PCC and studied web design. And I’ve been building websites, I started my own company shortly after that, and I’ve been doing it ever since with Water Link Web.

[00:05:21] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, you’ve been in the weeds for a fairly long time.

[00:05:24] Mary Ann Aschenbrenner: Yeah, well over a decade. 14 years or something like that.

[00:05:27] Nathan Wrigley: You’re obviously keeping up to date with all the different bits and pieces in the WordPress space, because the content of your presentation later today is, well, the title is Moving a Website from Classic to Block themes. Some examples, some live and learns. And so I’m guessing you’re going to be instructing people on, if they wish to make the move, how to go from what we call a classic theme.

[00:05:45] Mary Ann Aschenbrenner: It will be like the real step by step. This is what you do this first, you do this second, this is what it’s going to look like, these are the problems you may come into, and this is how to fix them. And voila, it’s going to be great.

[00:05:58] Nathan Wrigley: And so from your perspective, what’s the sort of, the single, well, maybe not single, maybe there’s a few things that you can mention, what are the most compelling reasons that you would ever want to move away from a classic theme?

Let’s say that I’ve got a website, it’s working perfectly fine. There’s nothing wrong with it, but I’m kind of curious. I want to explore the option. What are the big ticket items why you would wish to move?

[00:06:19] Mary Ann Aschenbrenner: Well, a couple of reasons. Often the plugins that might be associated with your old theme may no longer being maintained. So there’s one situation where I mentioned in the presentation, they’re not being maintained, you won’t be able to update the PHP on your server and you could have a site that’s open to hacking and be slower therefore, because it’s running on a lower grade PHP.

So that’s one reason to do it. Another is once you start using the block theme editor, you don’t want to go back. And so, you know, I’ve always maintained my skills with WordPress. I’ve been active in the WordPress community. I’ve continued to learn. And, yes, I’ll admit when the block editor first came out, I was a little trepidatious. I didn’t use it that first year. But the second year I did, and the third year I did. And I have been using the latest theme every year, ever since when I build my client’s websites.

So I just don’t like going back to the classic and then like, okay, how do we do this? It just isn’t as intuitive. And as well, it’s easy to maintain, you don’t have as much opportunity to make changes as you do in the new block editor. So I’m just gradually updating my clients.

[00:07:33] Nathan Wrigley: Do you have a background in code or are you more of a kind of mouse driven builder?

[00:07:38] Mary Ann Aschenbrenner: Do I have a background in code? I did a little HTML. I understand CSS and I certainly use that a lot with the classic theme, CSS especially. But that isn’t really where I trained in.

Really where my skill lies is working with my clients and creating a website that is unique to them. Every website I do is original. And I look at what colours they want, what values they want to display. And we design based on that.

And my clients love me. I mean, I’ve had clients over a decade. Still same clients, still working with me. And they trust me and I know it’s like, it’s time to upgrade your website and then we do that.

[00:08:20] Nathan Wrigley: I think one of the things about the classic themes was that having a deep knowledge of the code and the templating hierarchy in WordPress and those kind of things meant that it was available to some, but not necessarily to everybody.

Whereas the block based themes, the more modern WordPress, if you like, there is much more opportunity to get into the weeds. To do your templates and template parts and things like that with a visual editor.

So long as you can understand the UI, and where to find the menus, and where to construct the different parts of your website. And that promise of democratising publishing seems to be something that is being delivered, despite the fact that, you know, it’s a bit of a jump to go from classic to full site.

[00:08:58] Mary Ann Aschenbrenner: It is, absolutely. My daughter’s wedding photographer contacted me. She’d had a website on Squarespace, and she found out after 10 years of working as a wedding photographer in southern Oregon, she was only on page five of search results. And that’s ridiculous, but it’s because of where she had her website.

So she switched it over to WordPress and was confused, what do I do next? She had bought a photographer theme, and so it was going to work perfect for her. And I said, you know what? You see those three lines at the top of the page when you go to edit the page, hit them. And she did.

And then it was like, oh, the light went on. So she’s going to contact me again when she’s got that built out. But now she understands what to do. All she needed to learn was those three lines because then she knows she can edit every single block in there, and knows what to do.

[00:09:49] Nathan Wrigley: If you were to look at the growth of WordPress over the last, I’m going to say sort of 10 years, something like that, the uptick in WordPress usage up to kind of 40 plus percent, whatever it is now, I think there’s been a lot of page builders responsible for that uptick. So for example, the likes of Elementor or what have you.

And it was curious that in the blurb that went with your presentation, you particularly pointed out, I think the quote was, no page builder is needed, or something that. Is that a big part of it for you, that you don’t need to rely on any third party tool, often which have a fee attached to them for an annual or a recurring license or something like that? Is like that a big part of it?

[00:10:22] Mary Ann Aschenbrenner: I’ve never used page builders. And I have friends in the industry who love page builders, rely on page builders, and I have happy clients and I’ve never used a page builder. And the site is unique to them. I don’t feel like adding on another layer.

I’ve had to change over websites where a page builder was used, and it was very heavy, and slow because there was so much code. And back in the day, an individual who was vision impaired couldn’t use it because the web reader that they were using couldn’t read through all this extra code. I just never used it for that reason.

But I’m sure they’re better now. I do believe that, but you don’t need them. When you have the block editor, you don’t need a page builder.

[00:11:06] Nathan Wrigley: Are there any situations in which you wouldn’t ascribe the necessity to move over to a more modern, block based theme? In other words, is there any scenario where you look at somebody that’s on a classic theme and you say, you know what, just stay where you are, everything’s fine? Or are you always keen to promote people to move in this direction?

[00:11:25] Mary Ann Aschenbrenner: I’m not always keen to promote people. So I have a client who, oh gosh, she was part of the second wave feminist movement, and has a really great website people love. I built it for her in like 2015 and it’s still working fine. She can stay on it. She’s comfortable with it. You know, there’s no reason really, if it starts being an issue with the PHP levels and so forth, then I’ll talk to her about it.

[00:11:51] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I suppose there’s also, given the trends in graphic design and the way websites look, there’s always a moment in time where your website just begins to look stale on the front end.

[00:11:59] Mary Ann Aschenbrenner: Or it looks retro, or it looks cool. And the others all look the same. So there’s always that.

[00:12:05] Nathan Wrigley: So that, if you like, was more about the why of you may wish to move over to a, away from a classic theme.

So let’s move into the sort of the how then because that I think is the crux of your presentation really, how to do it and you need to demonstrate on the screen and what have you. So let’s go through that process. What is the first thing that you do when you are looking to transfer somebody over?

[00:12:25] Mary Ann Aschenbrenner: Well, the first thing you do is you set up a staging site. I’m not saying doing this live. Bring up a staging site on your server. It’s your same website and all it is is the new URL that says staging, dot, blah, blah, whatever.

Then after your staging site is up, you activate your 2025 theme. You may want to use 2024. 2024 is a really good theme as well. I think the patterns in 2024 are maybe a little more geared toward business, and the patterns in 2025 may be a little more geared towards personal blogs and artists. But pick one.

So you have now have the 2025 theme, and it’s going to look very plain because it’s just plain until you fix it. And the next thing I usually do is I go through and start editing the pages. So a lot of my old themes, I put in the classic editor plugin. Remember the classic editor plugin?

[00:13:18] Nathan Wrigley: I do, yeah.

[00:13:19] Mary Ann Aschenbrenner: Yeah, we were afraid of block editor so we all put classic editor on. And so it kind of keeps it looking classic. And, well, you deactivate that. And then when you go to a page or a blog post, you’ll see a little greyed block on the top of that content that says classic editor. You click it, and then it’ll say, convert to blocks. And this is where you just do it. You say, yes, I’m going to convert to blocks. You click it, and you got blocks.

Now, where you are going to find problems? But first of all, most of it deploys really well. Paragraphs deploy, they’re still paragraphs. Headers deploy, they’re still headers, et cetera, et cetera. But where you have columns, your original theme may have used some sort of a short code for columns that’s different than a block editor. So that may not convert.

Where you have embedded YouTube videos or something, you may decide to do them differently using the YouTube embed plugin instead of whatever code comes up. And you’ll get a little, if a paragraph doesn’t convert well or a block doesn’t convert well, it’ll say, you’ll know that.

But you still have your live site. So you can go there and find the content and put it back in. You know, it would would be cut and paste if you may have to chase down a YouTube link to embed a YouTube video. But it is all very doable and it’s pretty fast. It doesn’t take that long. I had a website with 200, over 200 blog posts that I had to do that on. That took a little while. But it was 200 blog posts, more than that actually. But for just a standard website with a dozen or so pages, it’s not hugely time consuming.

[00:14:54] Nathan Wrigley: I guess the only problems that may occur is if some part of the, well, let’s say theme, but it may be a plugin, but it may be part of the theme was injecting something somewhere. And in the classic editor you don’t see it, but it somehow surfaces on the front end. I don’t know, it may be the insertion of an ad or something like that. And then you may run into problems because you can’t see where that content’s coming from.

But I suppose in your scenario, you’re just flicking backwards and forwards between the current live site, which is the classic one, and then you’ve got your staging site, which is the block based one. I guess it’s just a jigsaw puzzle really. You’re trying to figure out, okay, why is that missing? Where does that come from? How can I deploy it in blocks and go through that process? And hopefully on each iteration you get more and more back to what the original content was.

[00:15:38] Mary Ann Aschenbrenner: Right, exactly. That’s how you do it.

[00:15:40] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. And so it’s a process of going through it kind of one at a time.

Have you ever encountered something which you couldn’t solve in that scenario? Have you ever come across something where you just throw your hands in the air and think, what, where’s that?

[00:15:50] Mary Ann Aschenbrenner: One time. So I had a website on a Studio Press theme, and I did the conversion. It all looked good to me. And then I realised when you were not logged into the site, the navigation didn’t show up properly. And I tried to figure that out and I redid the navigation. It looked good when you’re logged in, but when you’re just looking at the site not logged in, it wasn’t. So I ended up actually rebuilding that site entirely.

[00:16:16] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, interesting.

[00:16:17] Mary Ann Aschenbrenner: I just went ahead and brought up a whole new 2025 theme and copied and pasted content and brought it over.

[00:16:23] Nathan Wrigley: Okay, so rather than having a staging site, well, you presumably did have a staging site, but it wasn’t a case of going into the posts or the pages and clicking the convert button. This more of a, okay, something’s broken here, I need to start from scratch.

[00:16:34] Mary Ann Aschenbrenner: Something’s broken, I couldn’t figure it, I mean, I’m sure if I were a coder, I would’ve dug into the code. But it’s like, it’s going to take me hours, it’s going to be easier in this case. It didn’t have a ton of content. There was like six or eight pages and maybe four or five blog posts. So it wasn’t that hard to do. It was easier to just bring up the new 2025 theme and start fresh.

[00:16:54] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, in the scenario where you’ve only got a handful of pages, it probably is literally quicker to do it that way and copy and paste.

[00:16:58] Mary Ann Aschenbrenner: Especially if you see an issue pop up immediately. It’s something, the navigation, I couldn’t figure out why that wasn’t working. But it was a Studio Press theme, so something was coming through from the old theme.

[00:17:09] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. And you mentioned that this whole process where you, you go to your staging site and you go into a post or a page, and there’s this bar at the top. The content is missing essentially. And there’s this bar, it’s a grey bar and it looks.

[00:17:23] Mary Ann Aschenbrenner: Well, the content is usually there.

[00:17:24] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, but it’s all in the wrong, it’s as it was essentially. So it’s not yet as blocks. And you click the button, wait a heartbeat, a moment, and the WordPress sort of process of migrating one to the other just sort of takes over. Paragraphs become paragraphs blocks, and on you go. I’ve yet to have that fail on me in a catastrophic way. It’s never done anything unexpected.

[00:17:45] Mary Ann Aschenbrenner: It’s never failed catastrophically, not on me. And I’ve converted, even on that one website I just mentioned, the content converted great. It was just the navigation that was the issue. But I’ve used Canvas theme, which used to be produced by WooCommerce before it became a part of WordPress. And I’ve used, of course another theme on, that another website. So that content comes through actually, really easily.

[00:18:09] Nathan Wrigley: You mentioned also that you are using the default theme in most cases. So you mentioned 2025, but also you said, I think perhaps try 2024 or something like that. Is that your kind of go-to? Do you explore the ecosystem of other themes that are out there in the environment, either the repo or possibly commercial themes, or you just heavily leaning into default themes?

[00:18:28] Mary Ann Aschenbrenner: I just lean into the default theme.

[00:18:29] Nathan Wrigley: Is there any particular reason for that? Because obviously, you know it’s going to be updated, which is really nice. You know that it’s a, well, it’s deployed on every WordPress website, a standard if you download a vanilla version of WordPress.

[00:18:39] Mary Ann Aschenbrenner: It’ll be maintained for a long, long time. I know somebody who’s still in the 2015 theme and their site still works great.

[00:18:47] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, the backwards compatibility promise of WordPress is pretty remarkable.

[00:18:51] Mary Ann Aschenbrenner: It’s pretty remarkable.

[00:18:52] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Have you found limitations in those themes though? So one of the things that I think people wish were better would be, for example, things like navigation. You know, the options that you have in default blocks for navigation. Currently, there’s quite a lot of work going on to improve that as it happens. But are there any limitations that you’ve encountered where you thought, I wish it could do more?

[00:19:12] Mary Ann Aschenbrenner: I haven’t with the 2025, not recently anyway. But with 2024, I used a little bit of CSS in the navigation block. So add a little CSS.

[00:19:21] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, just tweak it a little bit. There’s a lot of requirements for maybe, I don’t know, mega menus, things like that, adaptations to the mobile menu that are not available in the blocks. And as we’re leaning more into kind of like a no code environment with block based themes.

[00:19:35] Mary Ann Aschenbrenner: I have used a plugin for mega menus on one of my clients.

[00:19:37] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. So you take care of that in a different way by using plugins? Yeah, okay. That kind of makes sense.

Okay, so that’s the bits and pieces perhaps about the sort of how you do it.

[00:19:46] Mary Ann Aschenbrenner: And the reason I used the mega menu plugin for that client was he had very specific ideas of how he wanted his navigation to look on cell phone.

[00:19:54] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, because it is fairly limited what you get out of the box. There’s not too many options and think the community is possibly moving towards having something a little bit better in the, yeah, a bit more full featured, let’s put it that way.

It’s a curious question, do you see any need for more than a single theme in the WordPress space anymore? So in other words, now that we’re leaning into an era where all of the bits and pieces that would’ve been handled by the theme is now handled by the interface of the block-based theme. So, for example, all of your templates is within the UI of full site editing and what have you. Do we even need a whole bunch of themes?

Could we just have a single theme which did the bare bones, maybe headers, footers, menus, that kind of thing. And then all of it is done by patterns or templates, which can be pointed on and clicked in, in the interface?

[00:20:44] Mary Ann Aschenbrenner: Well, I think that it’s good to have themes, and I’ll tell you why. My daughter’s wedding photographer. She is not a website designer. You know, she was used to using Squarespace, realised that the SEO on it sucked and decided to go to WordPress and found a great photography theme from a good maker of themes. I had no problem with it. I looked at it. And all she needed was a little tip on how to see where her blocks were and what the block is. She’s just going to be able to go with that.

Now if she was starting from scratch with no theme to work with, and just trying to figure it out, I think it’d be a lot harder for her. But having a template that’s like, here’s your photography template, she can put her own pictures in there. She understands the concept, and she’ll be able to build her own website with it.

[00:21:36] Nathan Wrigley: Do you find it’s easier for your clients then to work with the block based themes than it was with the classic themes?

[00:21:43] Mary Ann Aschenbrenner: Yes.

[00:21:44] Nathan Wrigley: I find sometimes it’s difficult to kind of work out where you are in the UI. You know, you’ve clicked on a bunch of things and you can’t figure out how to get back to where you were, things like that. But then if I weigh that up against how difficult it was with classic themes, where you had to basically have a code editor open at some point and be editing template, PHP files, and things like this. Although it’s a bit confusing navigating around the UI, I think even the people developing WordPress would say, yes, there’s a bit of work to be done on the UI. I think on the whole, it’s much easier, but I don’t know what your clients think.

[00:22:13] Mary Ann Aschenbrenner: You know how I explained to my clients, I said, if you use Mac, can you put together a Pages document and maybe add some images, can you do that? And they say, yes. I said, well, if they’re using Microsoft, can you do the same thing? Yes, I can. Well, then you can use the block theme.

Because once it’s set up, I mean, I think that there’s certain areas that are a little more tricky and for our clients, I’ll say, look, don’t get into the editor. Do not do full site editing. Let me do that. If you want to add something to the navigation, just tell me, I’ll edit it. It’s not a big deal. It takes me five minutes. They’re going to have to figure it out, because it’s only something they’re going to do once in a while when they change their navigation.

But for any of their pages, you know, they know how to hit the three lines, see what block they’re in, click it, it lights up the block on the right hand side, and then they can do the editing to the right of that. They can do it.

[00:23:03] Nathan Wrigley: Do you lean into the feature of locking blocks? Because it sounds like you’ve got a fairly close relationship with your clients. You’re probably able to get on the phone with them and things like that, have that communication. So you can just say, don’t touch that, leave that alone, and that’s fine.

But obviously in different scenarios where, I don’t know, it might be more corporate, that kind of thing, the capacity within native WordPress to exclude the client from being able to edit that.

So as an example, yeah, you can change the text on that block, but it’s a cover block, but we’re not going to allow you to change the background image. Or conversely, you can change the background image, but you can’t change the text, those kind of things. So these are sort of new features which have crept in over time, and I’m not sure how many people use those, whether or not that would be of interest to you and your clients.

[00:23:45] Mary Ann Aschenbrenner: You know, it’s their website. They may be on my servers that I’m hosting, but it’s their website and if they really want to mess it up, they can. And I can fix it. But really, it’s not a problem.

There’s been a few times, I have one client who adds content and he happened to add it all in tables. I don’t know why or how. I had to fix it on one of his pages. But, you know, I fixed it and the content is there down and it’s not in a table.

[00:24:10] Nathan Wrigley: Do you build into your process, when you have converted something from classic to block base, do you have like an education piece in the middle there somewhere?

[00:24:18] Mary Ann Aschenbrenner: Oh, yes.

[00:24:19] Nathan Wrigley: So time to show the client how to use it. Because obviously they may be very familiar with classic editing, or it may be something that they’re not really dabbling in that much. Either way, it’s not at all like the new thing. And how do you do that? Do you allocate time? Do you have videos prepared or just sit next to them in their offices?

[00:24:35] Mary Ann Aschenbrenner: You know, we usually do it as like a Zoom call. They share their screen. Well, actually, during the process, there’ll be times when I’m on the phone in a Zoom call with the client or a Google Meet call with the client, and I’m showing them what I’m doing on my end. So that’s part of the education process.

And we talk about, okay, do you like this font? No, I don’t like this one. Okay, well, how about this one? They see me change things back and forth. I put up content and they say, oh, we want to edit that. We want to rephrase it like this.

So if we’re doing it on a Zoom call, it’s going back and forth, they see how I’m working. And I make a point, oh, see how I hit these three lines, and we can edit this paragraph block, let’s put a background on this paragraph block. Here’s how you do it. So they learn how to do that, just kind of as we’re building it.

And then when it’s done, I will definitely show them how, anything they want to change. And I’ll walk through them how to add a blog post, for example. Usually the pages are pretty dialed in by the time we go live, it’s exactly where they want. So they might need to learn how to add blog posts. And I’ll introduce them to the blocks I think they’re going to use. They don’t need to know how to do every single block because there’s so many blocks.

[00:25:46] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Do you switch some of them off, make them unavailable? I don’t know, there’s things like the Animoto Block, which goodness knows whoever was using that, I don’t know. But it’s there. I think most clients don’t need them. And having the capacity to switch some blocks off, quite a nice idea.

[00:26:00] Mary Ann Aschenbrenner: You can. I haven’t done that.

[00:26:01] Nathan Wrigley: No, okay. And are there any common gotchas? When you’ve gone through this process multiple times, is there anything which comes out the other end which is reliably strange to the client? You know, okay every client’s reporting back either, nothing, this is brilliant, it’s a hundred percent, I’m all on board. Or do you have common things which you have to explain over and over again to the different clients because it’s just quirky?

[00:26:21] Mary Ann Aschenbrenner: There’s a couple clients that are boards, nonprofit boards, and so then I have to explain it over and over again.

[00:26:29] Nathan Wrigley: And is that because of the nature of.

[00:26:31] Mary Ann Aschenbrenner: Because the person I’m talking to changes.

[00:26:33] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, okay.

[00:26:34] Mary Ann Aschenbrenner: Sometimes clients will want something I don’t really feel like I can deliver. So I have a client who wants full with image, with content on top of it, and wants it to be a slider. So there’ll be a full width image with content and a button, and then another full width image with content and a button. It’s a slider. So I created this.

And then when it was done, they were like, well, I want the whole image to show on a cell phone. I had to explain, if that entire image gets so narrow that it shows on a cell phone and it’s not very tall, your content won’t fit in it. And it was really hard to accept. So that kind of thing can occur.

[00:27:12] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I mean, it’s not for everybody, but I feel at this point, this is the future of WordPress. This is the way it’s going to go. This is what most people are talking about and what have you. Just getting into your presentation later, firstly, good luck with it. I hope it goes well.

[00:27:26] Mary Ann Aschenbrenner: Thank you.

[00:27:27] Nathan Wrigley: How are you tackling this subject? Are you going to be doing slides? Because it’ll be curious, the audience, presumably in front of you are, well, we’re at WordCamp. Presumably they are a bunch of WordPressers. I’m curious to know at what level you are pitching it.

[00:27:39] Mary Ann Aschenbrenner: You know, I think somebody who’s fairly new to WordPress will be able to get a lot out of this. I think it’s geared towards somebody with a little bit of experience, not a lot.

I’m going to talk about three different websites. One of them was actually built in 2006 on Blogger. I wasn’t the one that built it. And two other websites. And I’m going to talk a little bit about the City of Portland, so people who come to this, even if they know everything I’m talking about will learn a little bit about the City of Portland.

[00:28:05] Nathan Wrigley: And this is all filmed as well, which is kind of nice. And these days those videos tend to get turned around pretty quickly. Long gone is the day that you would attend a WordCamp and then six months, a year later, the video would still be stuck in somebody’s hard disk.

Hopefully by the time this podcast episode drops, that will be out and we’ll be able to watch your presentation. I think I’ve asked everything that I wish to ask. Is there anything that you think that we didn’t touch during our conversation?

[00:28:31] Mary Ann Aschenbrenner: There is.

[00:28:31] Nathan Wrigley: Go for it.

[00:28:32] Mary Ann Aschenbrenner: While I was building the site with 200 blog posts, I discovered a little, what I thought was a glitch. And it turns out it’s a feature. But if you were a developer, you think it’s a feature. So in the 2025 theme, when you go to templates, you go to your website editor and you go to patterns, and then you have the header, the footer, and the page templates.

For the blog page, I pick a page template for the blog page, just that one. And then I can go in and I can select the style of my query loop. So if I want a query loop that’s just a picture on the left and content on the right for that blog page, and then people can scroll through and see all the different blog posts.

I picked one that was different than that. So I picked it, and then I deployed it, and then I went to the blog page and looked at it and it looked great. Except when I hit next page, it returned to the same page. It never was advancing to all these other 200 blog posts. And I was like, what happened here?

So I went back to the template, page, templates, blog page, picked a different query loop. Same thing. Picked a third query loop. Ah, this one worked. I could advance to the next pages. So then I was curious, why is this?

So I went back to that template, hit the three line dropdown arrow, looked at every single block in there and saw a pagination block that had not been in the others at the bottom of the group. So then I copied that and I put it in. And voila, my original one worked, I was very happy with it.

So I went yesterday to the Contributor Day and I sat at the Core Performance table, and normally not where I would belong, and said, this is your issue, it’s got to be fixed. And they looked at it, and a couple more people looked at it, and then they explained to me that not all query loops are used on the blog page. Some might be used on a landing page. And you may not want a next pages on every one of your query loops, so it’s not there on everyone.

[00:30:53] Nathan Wrigley: It’s kind of interesting that it got there on one of them. And I think this is something that can be quite confusing, things like that, which in the old world, you would’ve dropped in as a short code. And in order to get that short code, you would’ve gone into some other UI and configured it all, and then the short code would’ve been spat out with the correct parameters to do what you wanted. So there might have been a toggle for show pagination, take pagination off, and what have you. And then the short code would ultimately do that.

In the block editor, this kind of thing happens fairly frequently in that there are nested blocks. And if you don’t deploy the nested blocks, so for example, if you didn’t know that pagination was a separate block, which usually sits outside of the query loop, usually below it in the same group or something like that, it’s easy to think, well, it ought to be there. Why isn’t it there? And sometimes you have to go find that pagination block, insert it in the right place and what have you.

Yeah, so things like that, if you don’t see it, you don’t see it. It’s not intuitive to think that it ought to be there. And I can think of probably dozens of examples of that kind of thing where blocks that you may rely on are in fact nested blocks of other blocks, and they may not come in automatically.

So, yeah, it’s a process of figuring that out, and maybe a toggle inside the query loop block saying, just enable pagination, turn it off, or something like that.

[00:32:11] Mary Ann Aschenbrenner: That might be helpful. But I was able to fix it, and I realise now that it actually is a feature because they can, you can go to those query loops and look at all sorts of query loops that you might use elsewhere on your website. So I thought it was great to go to Contributor Day. I contributed and I learned.

[00:32:28] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, that’s really nice. And people were able to explain it to you. Yeah, definitely a thing if you come to a WordCamp, certainly of this magnitude, attend the Contributor Day. And it’s not just a process of contributing, it can be a process of sitting next to people who are working and asking them questions and thereby upping your own knowledge.

[00:32:44] Mary Ann Aschenbrenner: And I don’t think that they were aware of it until I pointed it out.

[00:32:47] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, they’re in the weeds of deploying it, and they may not consider all the use cases. And in this case, you had one in which it didn’t work as expected. I guess from their point of view, everything that they said is probably true. You know, it may be deployed in this way, it may not, and so we built it in such a way that you can have the pagination or not, but nevertheless, you kind of needed it right away.

Well, that’s brilliant. Thank you so much Mary. Appreciate you chatting to me today.

Where can we find you if people would like to reach out about anything you’ve talked about? Where’s the best places?

[00:33:14] Mary Ann Aschenbrenner: On my website is waterlinkweb.com. You can find me there. I’m on Instagram at Water Link Web. I have a LinkedIn, Mary Ann Aschenbrenner at LinkedIn. And I think that does it.

[00:33:28] Nathan Wrigley: Well, thank you very much. I’ll make sure all those bits and pieces get into the show notes. So head to wptavern.com, search for the episode with Mary Ann Aschenbrenner. I will hopefully speak to you another time. Thank you very much for chatting to me.

[00:33:40] Mary Ann Aschenbrenner: Thank you very much, Nathan.

On the podcast today we have Mary Ann Aschenbrenner.

Mary Ann has been the President of Waterlink Web, a digital agency specialising in WordPress web design since 2014. Her experience includes e-Commerce and membership websites, websites for local nonprofit organisations, and starter websites for small businesses. As a life-long learner, Mary Ann likes to keep pace with the latest innovations in WordPress. She is a fan of block themes and particularly the WordPress default themes.

We start by discussing the differences between classic and block themes, with Mary Ann offering practical, step-by-step advice for anyone considering a move from a classic theme to a modern block-based theme. She talks about why you might want to make the switch, potential challenges to look out for, and stories from her own experience converting client sites.

We also chat about the evolution of WordPress, the diminishing need for third-party page builders, the importance of client education, and the ongoing improvements in the block editor. Plus, Mary Ann shares insights from her WordCamp presentation, and her experiences collaborating with the WordPress community.

Whether you’re a seasoned WordPresser, or are just starting out, and keen to know how block themes are making site building more accessible for everyone, this episode is for you.

Useful links

Mary Ann Aschenbrenner on LinkedIn

Waterlink Web

Friends of Pier Park website

Moving a Website from Classic to a Block Theme

StudioPress

Blogger