#146 – Fränk Klein on Redesigning WordPress: The Shift to Block-Based Systems

Transcript

[00:00:00] 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, the shift to block by systems in all parts of WordPress.

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So on the podcast today, we have Fränk Klein. Fränk is a principal engineer at Human Made and brings a wealth of experience from his extensive history with WordPress, having started with the platform in 2011. He previously worked at Automattic, and now directs his expertise towards WP Development Courses, where he teaches block theme and custom block development.

Fränk talks about the modernization of PHP within WordPress, a topic that often gets overshadowed by the hype around Javascript. We get into Human Made’s work and enterprise focused WordPress agency renowned for serving high profile clients, such as the Harvard Gazette and TechCrunch. Fränk explains the intricate custom backend development needed to meet the complex requirements of enterprise clients, like sophisticated editorial workflows for clients like banks.

Fränk provides a comprehensive breakdown of the Gutenberg projects four phases, content editing, site customization, collaborative editing, and multi-lingual capabilities. We explore how FSE is transforming WordPress by integrating new editing tools, and modernizing the admin interface. Moving the platform from its classic roots to a more dynamic block-based editing environment.

Fränk shares his unique perspectives on the challenges and rewards of engineering and teaching within the WordPress ecosystem. He stresses the importance of understanding client needs and the necessity for developers to engage in continuous learning.

We also talk about using traditional WordPress solutions and third party page builders, like Bricks, Beaver Builder and Elementor. Fränk argues for the streamlined, block-based systems, offered by WordPress core, citing both financial and technical benefits.

Our conversation continues into the broader implications of WordPress’s ongoing evolution, the significant admin interface redesigns, and its impact on users and agencies. Fränk discusses, the challenges users face with these changes, and the importance of improving communications within the WordPress community to facilitate smoother transitions.

Towards the end, Fränk talks about his experiences with course creation and content maintenance, particularly given the fast paced changes in WordPress features. He emphasizes the need for a solid grasp of foundational web development concepts to fully leverage the platforms evolving tools.

If you’re keen on understanding how full site editing and other WordPress innovations can enhance your projects, and wish to gain insights into the evolving WordPress landscape, this episode is for you.

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

And so without further delay, I bring you Fränk Klein.

I am joined on the podcast today by Fränk Klein. How are you doing Fränk?

[00:04:10] Fränk Klein: I’m doing great. Thank you for having me.

[00:04:12] Nathan Wrigley: Really nice to have you on the podcast today. We’re going to talk a lot about full site editing. I’m not entirely sure where the conversation is going to go. But before we do that, Fränk, just over to you really for a brief moment on your bio. Just tell us about your history with WordPress, perhaps where you work, maybe some interesting projects that you’ve worked on. Anything you like really, but just tell us a little bit about you and WordPress.

[00:04:35] Fränk Klein: Yeah, so I started in WordPress in 2011, software engineer. I worked at a small agency in Luxembourg, and then from then I went to Automattic, wordpress.com, then VIP. And now I’m at Human Made, where I’m now principal engineer, which is great. I get to work on a lot of interesting projects.

And kind of out of that activity comes my WP Development Courses business. So where I do sell courses to WordPress developers. So obviously block theme development is one of the focuses of that.

The thing is, because I am self-taught, it kind of simplifies with the people that don’t have any formal background in programming, and I try to help this out as much as possible.

[00:05:11] Nathan Wrigley: For your courses, do you focus entirely on blocks, and full site editing, and the new, in air quotes, way of doing WordPress? Is that your thing, Gutenberg a hundred percent?

[00:05:22] Fränk Klein: It used to be that, but now, so there is one on block theme development, there’s one on custom block development. But now I’m also going back to a course that I previously, which is about WordPress unit testing, so PHP unit testing.

So the title I like to use right now is more modern PHP, so what’s happening in the PHP world. Because I think that we have been moving a lot, we have been talking a lot about JavaScript and everything like that, but that has kind of slowed down.

But the PHP has picked up quite a lot, because PHP is modernising quite rapidly in terms of how the language works. And PHP is still a big part of WordPress, even though it doesn’t get maybe the love that we need to give it to. But yeah, there’s lots of interesting things happening there.

[00:05:59] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, it’s certainly not getting the attention that it once did. In fact, almost to the point where it never gets mentioned really. But like you said, quite a lot of exciting developments.

Again, just very, very briefly, the Human Made side of things, if you haven’t come across Human Made, Human Made are a, I’m going to call it enterprise agency. Do you just want to give us some insight into the kind of work that you and the team do over there? What kind of projects you’re involved in.

You may or may not be able to elucidate on that, but just interested to know at that kind of level, what kind of projects you might be involved in.

[00:06:29] Fränk Klein: Yes, Human Made, we call it an enterprise WordPress agency. Now, enterprise can be a very wide word, what fits in there? But Human Made works with everything from publishing companies, to banks, to universities. One of the more recent projects that my colleagues in the US did was the Harvard Gazette, a really great project also block based.

Then we have worked in the past with TechCrunch, the million dollar website as Jamie called it. So that was the previous iteration.

And so generally, when it comes to enterprise, what distinguishes it from the rest of WordPress is maybe not, so the budget definitely is, because the budgets tend to be higher, but enterprises, they have very specific needs. So there’s a lot of custom development, and they have a lot of demand, especially for backend customisations.

So when you build a website, there’s always going to be the front end, the design, everything like that. But that’s the same across every project. But when you go to the enterprise, depending on the type of business that you run, for example, a bank, what we have developed is a system where instead of just when you hit publish, the blog post goes live, or the content. There is a system where it goes to approval, and then they can say that the change isn’t approved. So all of those publishing customisations there’s a little part of it. It’s the workflow and also the interface. So that’s a big part of what we do is actually customising the editing experience in WordPress.

[00:07:52] Nathan Wrigley: Really interesting. You can go and check those websites out. Just by the way, anything that we mention in the podcast today, you can get the show notes over at wptavern.com/podcast. Go and search over there, and anything that we mention, if we don’t read out the URL, you’ll be able to find it, including links to Human Made, and Fränk’s courses as well.

But turning to the main focus of the podcast today, we’re going to try and get into the weeds of FSE, full site editing.

Now, if you are fairly new to WordPress, you may be unfamiliar that there was ever any change. But if you’ve been in WordPress for anything longer than a couple of years, you’ll know that what has changed over the last several years has been pretty profound.

It’s kind of all wrapped up inside the Gutenberg project, if you like, which has come in four phases. We’re currently on the third of those four phases, collaborative editing. I have to say, the collaborative editing piece seems to have stopped becoming the center of all attention at the moment. I haven’t seen a great deal of coverage of that, but hopefully that will pick up and we’ll get something akin to Google Docs, or something like that inside our WordPress installs.

But the first of those phases, content editing, was followed by site customisation and then, like I said, we’re in collaborative editing at the moment. And then finally ending up with multilingual, so the ability to natively turn your site into a multilingual website.

Where does full site editing fit into all of this jigsaw puzzle, Fränk? And also what promise does it bring? How will it change a WordPress install from a couple of years ago to something in the more, air quotes, modern WordPress?

[00:09:25] Fränk Klein: That’s a big question, but it goes back to when we talk about full site editing. So what we now say is full site editing, essentially site editor. That is what we call the tool that is in the admin.

And then the other part of it is the block theme. And those together then form what we now call full site editing. And that is the second phase actually of the Gutenberg roadmap.

And the thing is, at this moment, if you go to WordPress install at this time, and you click on the admin, it looks like it has always looked, right? The admin hasn’t changed, but when you go to the post editor, you get the block editor. When you go to the appearance, so let’s go to the theme editor, what comes up is the site editor.

And so right now we having these weird experiences where you click on the post edit and it becomes full screen, and the admin UI is gone, inside it is kind of the same. And so we need to understand those four phases, not as being four different things that are going to be delivered, but really it’s just pieces of one big admin redesign.

So there’s, I think, what was in the beginning. And so Matt, Matt Mullenweg published a blog post, I think it was in 2017. I think we called it Gutenberg For a Reason, that was the title. And it really laid out everything that they want to change, all of the people that this concerns, which is everybody that uses WordPress.

And once that kind of groundwork was laid, they didn’t go into it much afterwards. So that is why, when we talk about full site editing, we have these two pieces. What it changes right now, and just the specific concerns that we have with it. But also the groundwork that is laid for the phase three, which is right now is called still collaboration, but I think it’s more content editing reimagined.

Because right now, if you’re on the site editor, sure, you have functionalities like, I can change my templates, I can change the header, the footer, or the patterns, all that is built in. But you also now have, for example, pages available in the site editor, and you can go into content editing mode, you can go into template editing mode. So already we are mixing everything together.

And so that is the part where, when we go to phase two, the original name was customisation. So it wasn’t theme building, it wasn’t theme adaptation, it was really customisation because the idea was that, with a site editor, we’re going to reimagine the way that you interact with your WordPress website. And so the phases two and three are just going extend on that admin concept.

And so WordPress under the hood, as part of this, is building out all of the pieces that are going to be put in place to complete admin redesign. Then actually, if you look at WooCommerce, which is of course one of the biggest, if not, I think the biggest plugin out there in WordPress, they’re are doing the same thing while they are modernising their admin experience. They’re both aligning to give that new interface feel to WordPress.

And I think that’s something which is not a lot talked about in the wider community, that for sure we have the theme building, we have that very practical aspects, but it’s also the bigger perspective in that we are going to need to get rid of that admin that we know right now, which has been by now as old as WordPress, close to being as old as WordPress. So it’s a complete redoing of the experience.

[00:12:27] Nathan Wrigley: Coming from an agency which is dealing with big ticket items, you know, websites that presumably have some sort of fairly large user base, and certainly I would imagine fairly deep pockets for their development, bespoke development at that. But also having a set of courses which are trying to teach aspects of all this, how do you think the whole phases approach has been handled, but particularly the redesign?

And rather than calling it full site editing, let’s call it what I think you called it, something along the lines of the admin redesign, or something like that. How do you think that’s gone?

And what my question really is asking is, if you could rewind the clock, let’s say four years, to a period in which the admin had not been redesigned in any way, shape, or form, you could create content with the block editor inside posts, and pages, and so on, but outside of that, everything was as it was.

How do you feel that it’s been managed, the transition slowly over time into this reimagined admin area, full site editing and what have you?

My impression, because I’m in it all the time, and I see the tiny little changes, and I notice it happening, it doesn’t really jar with me all that much, but I have the intuition that people who are, I don’t know, casual users of WordPress, perhaps they’re just logging into achieve a thing on their Monday morning that they need to do on the website, and then they want to log out and never look at the website again for the rest of the week.

I feel it must have been quite a difficult thing to keep track of. New things this week, which are removed next week, and then another thing replaces it, and then, oh, if I click here, oh look, now it looks nothing like it did five minutes ago and for the last 20 years. So how well do you think it’s been handled? How easy has it been for people to cope with? I know that’s a lot.

[00:14:09] Fränk Klein: Yeah, I think that we can always look back and say, I would’ve done this and that in the other, knowing in hindsight. That’s always the luxury that we have. But, it kind of depends on how you want to develop your product. And I think that WordPress, what we shouldn’t forget is that a lot of people now look at WordPress and say, well, a lot is changing and some things are unstable.

But actually if we go back in time, it kind of always has been like that. It’s just that most people do not see the changes that were done because they are just dealing with the admin, they’re doing content editing stuff which was very stable.

But I remember when the customiser was introduced. I mean, it wasn’t like this was the smoothest launch ever. And so I still remember because then I was, I think I was already at Automattic, or maybe not. But the situation was that every theme had their custom admin pages with a bunch of fields, they had their own frameworks. Everybody was sad, everybody was happy. And so then WordPress comes and says, oh, we are now going to do customiser. Huge drama, nobody wants to change it.

And then years later everybody uses a customiser, and now the next thing comes along, it’s like, oh, now we’re going to use the site editor. Huge drama. So it’s just a repeating cycle. But where it is difficult is, yeah, just these changes being introduced. The patterns, for example, it started out with having reusable blocks. I think that was the first feature that there was. So saving a block into the database, you can add it to other pages. And then if you change one instance, everything updates, great.

And then comes a pattern, which is more a theme developer thing back then, because you could only do it in themes previously. So you have these two concepts, and then suddenly they say, well, this is kind of the same thing because what we want to do now is you should be able to change the patterns also in the editor. So why don’t we just merge the two because they are similar.

So those get merged in and then that’s, I think it was at 6.2, or 6.3. Then it’s me standing there, hey, in 6.2 we used reusable blocks, but now it’s called a pattern, now it works this way. So obviously there’ve been a lot of changes and I don’t think that’s going to stop because they’re just trying things and getting feedback.

But generally it’s also the case that if you look at your clients in the agency world, they’re using very few features actually of the whole thing. So what we see as developers, all of the changes, for them it doesn’t really matter to be honest, in most cases, doesn’t matter. If you tell them, hey, what used to be a reusable block now is a pattern, they’re going to say, okay, yeah, I get it.

Yeah, it’s kind of hard how this thing has been rolled out. But definitely what I do criticise is that we all remember the famous learn JavaScript deeply speech, and it was good advice, but also bad advice. The advice was good because the direction was, everybody’s using JavaScript, so we as WordPress are also going to go more into JavaScript because they need it to build those interactive experiences. But learn JavaScript deeply is not a great path to follow.

And so if you talk to me and tell me I’m in this situation, I will need to learn this, I’m going to say, you do this, you that, you do the other, right? It’s a roadmap, and you can just follow it and it’ll work out fine.

So in the beginning there wasn’t really a lot of direction, what you should learn, how you should learn it. And also all of the things that we have now, where we have a dedicated developer blog, where we have people like Jamie, there is Justin, there is Nick Diego, there’s Rich. So all these people that we know like, in quotes. There are two community outreach, developer outreach, things like that, wasn’t there.

So I think if you would have that right from the beginning, all these people, it would’ve been a lot smoother because you still need somebody to, it’s one thing to have a change log that says, WordPress is now adding this feature, but that is not of the what.

And so then they also show the how, but you are not understanding the why. And so the why is the big piece where we need somebody that comes in and says, okay, we have this feature, it works this way. But you can use it in this fashion, in that fashion. And so that kind of basic layer of just the big why things are there, I think that is missing just in the free content that is out there.

[00:18:05] Nathan Wrigley: I’ve got a couple of things to add to that. So the first thing is I think the customiser bit that you said, was similar in magnitude, you know, and confusion. I guess the thing about the customiser is at least there was just one single purpose for being there. If you went into the customiser, it was basically to change the way things looked. Colors, or padding, or the number of posts in an archive, or whatever it may be.

You were looking at the way the front end looked in the customiser, and you could understand that. I guess the difference here with the admin overhaul, again, there’s no perfect word for it, but that’ll do, is that it encapsulates so many things, and that it’s a completely rolling program. So, it’ll be this one week, and then a few weeks later it’ll be something slightly different.

And like you said, the naming of things gets changed. And then you get things like synced patterns and all of that, that we just have to rename things over time. But in the end, it’ll settle.

And I also think that there is definitely more boots on the ground. The appointment of Jamie Marsland, you’ve said Jamie’s name a couple of times, I’m assuming that you mean Jamie Marsland, being put out as a, not really the developer advocate, but when things have been developed, his task now is to corral people himself and other people in the community to put out content to show how that works.

I think that was a real missing piece. And then you’ve obviously got learn.wordpress.org, developer.wordpress.org, and all of these different resources. And I think more work is going in right now than ever has before on the education piece afterwards. Whether or not people are seeing them, I don’t know. But it definitely seems like there is more effort going into explain how things are done, almost at the same time that they’re getting released, if you know what I mean. So content on YouTube within weeks of a new feature dropping, that’s new to me, and it’s really helpful when I see those.

[00:19:53] Fränk Klein: Right. I think the problem that WordPress has is that you have so many different profiles, and it’s hard to do content which fits everybody because there is the user aspect. So that is more on the WordPress Learn side. So that’s more end user, I would call it.

Jamie is also, I guess, in that space, and then you have the developer blog is very much more developer stuff. But one of the challenges is when we look at what I teach, so I do teach the features for sure, but it’s all down to a specific angle. And so the challenge that we have, I think in WordPress, and that we need to recognise is that when I learned WordPress, I didn’t just open WordPress and then started typing stuff. I knew that it used PHP. So I first learned PHP, I was actually quite decent in PHP before I got to the WordPress, which is lucky for me.

But the thing is that, yes, there is a lot of content that is being released, but it’s all very piecemeal. And so the challenge is that you need to take a step back, that’s how I organise my learning materials, that we need to understand the big picture, the concepts that are there, and then once you understand those, then you’re going to be able to understand all of the rest.

Because it’s the same thing when you go from, for example, so I knew PHP, that is the language that I definitely learned from books and everything like that. And then JavaScript, I knew somewhat, I mean, jQuery really, let’s be honest. But then when I had to learn it for real, my knowledge of PHP helped me a lot because I understood all of the concepts.

For me, it’s not just code. I know what a variable is, what the function is, how it works, what scope is. All of these more foundational stuff that you learn when you have a computer sciences background, or something like that, formal education, you’ll learn it. But when you’re self-taught you’ll not necessarily learn that.

And so that is something missing because, for example, Jamie has those speed builds, right? And I find them cool, they’re a cool demo. And we kind of had this little disagreement of where I said, the speed build is cool, but it’s that, it’s cool. You don’t really build websites for clients this way, where you go in and choose just will nilly change stuff.

You need to really go into the design and say, okay, what are the font, the sizes, the colors, the spacings. So really create that design system, then you enter that. And once you have that foundation, where all of those design system values are created, then you start building out the designs. And then we’ll see that most of the stuff that you drop in, it already looks like it should look. It has the right font, it has the right size.

And so it’s more, because when you write CSS it’s the same thing. You don’t just look at the red button and make a red button class. No, you have a certain color system, you have a certain foundational values for the HTML tag. So everything that way that you would build out your CSS in layers, that go from the least specific to the most specific, with full site editing is quite the same.

And so the challenge that we have as a developer community is to realise that with the tooling is changing, and we are now building things visually, but all of the, let’s say the tech part underneath it, it’s still the same. It’s HTML, it’s CSS, it’s PHP, right? So that’s what the front end runs on. And we just need to take those concepts and apply them in the site editor. And then the transition is going to be a lot easier.

But definitely some developers have a problem with, instead of just saying, I want to write code, I’ve decided that you’re not really writing a lot of code, and that is unfortunately or fortunately where the direction is going. That depends on how you’re looking at it.

But I think with the whole perspective that we need to have on this is that you may look at the site editor and say, it’s weird that it tries to do this page builder like approach with content editing built in. Because a lot of developers say, I want it to distinguish from each other.

But it’s more that the people that now start building websites with any of the tools that are out there, that is the experience that they get, it’s a visual builder. And so in the same way as, my daughter is six years old, she doesn’t know what the landline phone is. She saw one at my grandparents and she says, what’s that? Well, that’s a phone.

And so, yeah, for them, the children that grow up now, obviously everything is a smartphone, everything has a touch interface. They don’t know what we knew with actual buttons, and blackberries, and all that stuff. And so that’s the perspective that we need to take. There was a very interesting podcast with Josh Hall, who has a podcast, and Mark Szymanski I think, I hope I’m not butchering his name. I think the title was even, is WordPress for old people?

And so, yeah, I mean, I’m 40. I’m not really old, but I’m not spring chicken. And that’s a perspective that we need to have. We are in the middle of this transition and we know the old, and the new, and for us, while we’re in the middle of that transition, it’s going to be hard.

But every day there are new people coming onto the web, and WordPress needs to be the thing that they expect, needs to be a visual builder. And they don’t know about the customiser/ they for sure don’t know about settings, pages that we used in the past. For them it’s all, it’s as much history as a landline phone. And so that’s a perspective which we need to have when we look at this project.

[00:24:39] Nathan Wrigley: It’s kind of interesting, when you play with SaaS products, when they want to radically change their UI UX, they’ll typically be some sort of upgrade path. There’ll be a button in the UI saying, do you want to try out the new interface? And you click the button, and there you go, and you have a period of time.

But typically, the companies presumably dog fooded at that UI UX and figured out, okay, this is the end result, this is basically what we want to offer, and we’re at the point now where we just want a little bit of guidance, where we’ve gone wrong on a few minor points. And then some people opt into it, and stay with it, other people say, actually, do you know what? I’m just going to stay with the old interface for a little while.

We’ve got that kind of in WordPress, you know, if you use a block-based theme then those options become available, but if you use a, in air quotes, classic theme, you’re still with how it always was. But I do think that we’re presented with a different problem in that it’s so very different, and so in a state of flux. And there’s so much that has changed, and so much that will change. I feel it’s quite, I’m going to use the word discombobulating. It’s just tricky to make the decision to flip over.

And when I frequent, I don’t know, things like social networks, X, or Facebook groups and what have you, there’s also this whole other thing of third party page builders, where people have just opted and sort of said, look, I don’t want anything to do with any of that, I want to just go with Bricks, or Beaver Builder, or Elementor, and I’m just going to handle it all that way, which makes it even more difficult to coalesce on what’s the correct path.

So we’re definitely living in interesting times. Like you said, we’re in the middle of it at the moment. I’m kind of hoping that at some point it settles down, and we get some sort of muscle memory on where everything is, and how everything works, and that it stabilises and nothing much changes. And I feel we’re getting there at the moment.

But it sounds from everything that you’ve said that you are putting all of your bets on full site editing, block-based everything, as opposed to, well, any other way of doing it. Classic themes, or third party page builders, or what have you.

Why are you so bullish? Why do you think that this is the correct path? Why will WordPress and it’s core offerings succeed, do you think?

[00:26:45] Fränk Klein: I think we already had that lined last time we saw each other, I’m fully in on that. So I built a production website at Human Made with the block editor that was still in Gutenberg. So we launched a couple of months, I think two or three before it officially was merging WordPress 5.0. And that was just because block-based editors were a thing before WordPress introduced it.

Notion, for example, which is very popular, it’s a block editor. And I was very aware of the limitations of the classic editor. Yeah, so for me it made total sense, just from the content editing perspective. And this is where it’s kind of hard to distinguish when you don’t know what to choose, and you see two people posting on X, or on Facebook, and one says, oh yeah, this is great, editors love it. Another person says, no, they hate it.

So I can say that very comfortably that editors love it, because I work with a lot of big publishing brands. They have a lot of people that write content, and they all love the block editor.

So the other person maybe has talked to one person once that didn’t like it, and now that’s opinion. So that’s the hard part, is that when you listen to somebody’s opinion, you should look at, okay, what are they doing? What is their background? Why do they have that opinion? And that goes in both ways.

When you are a user of a specific page builder, you need to look at, okay, what is this person doing? Why do they like this? But the problem that we have in WordPress is that if you Google on YouTube how to build a website, or how to build the WordPress website, there’s going to be a gazillion videos that use some kind of third party solution. And that is just influencers that want to make money through affiliates.

And so that is, I think, changing because when we look at the economic incentives for you to build using Core WordPress, it’s zero, it’s free. I can just take it, it’s all there for me, versus having a product that I recommend, and again, 30% of whatever the price is. That skews the debate a little bit unfortunately.

Because when you, for example, let’s say you don’t know how to build a website at all. You Google it, you find a video that explains to you, oh, we use this product here, this product like that. You think that this is what WordPress is.

And so when we talk about page builders, for me it’s always, you do what you do, and if it works for you, then I’m fine with it, right? I have my position on it, but if you have a different position, that’s great. But it’s different than, if you built your website using this page builder and it’s your own website, then you took the decision and you own it fully. When you are an agency and you build a website for a client using a specific product, and then this client wants to move off of the page builder, and they come to a different agency. Then you say, oh, I have this website, I have this man, this content, how do I get it off whatever thing?

And then you’re saying, yeah, we can do some automated migration, but really you have to rebuild a lot, and then you are totally falling out of the sky. It’s like, why, it’s WordPress? Why can’t you just take WordPress and put a new theme on it, and then it’s going to be great?

And then we get into, well, you need to understand that, yada yada. So it’s going to be a lot of technical mumbo jumbo, they have zero interest in it. And unfortunately it’s also going to be very pricey. If you have a lot of content to take from some kind of solution, which doesn’t store the content in the format that is native that WordPress can understand, it’s going to be a lot of hard work to get it right.

So there is the data liberation project, which is going to help with that hopefully. But it’s also the case that certain page builders, just due to the way that they are built, it’s very hard to make sense of it. You have page builders that give you a total freedom that you build, so it’s essentially just blobs of HTML and so, how do you make sense of blobs of HTML? It’s very hard.

So the whole deal with blocks is, what is not understood is, that theme building in WordPress was fine, it was a solved problem. But the problem was that WordPress has zero clue what you have in your templates. Some PHP, some HTML, some JavaScript, and you cannot go through that in a programmatic way and say, this is the title, this is the content.

So what blocks give you is that every block is self-contained, and you know exactly what it is. This is a title, this is a paragraph, this is a header block. And so to have that freedom of customising your designs, you need to give structure to it. And so blocks solve that problem that we now can break up a design to different pieces, and customise them individually.

But also it solves the long standing problem of who wins out. Because it’s like this, you build a website, you take a theme, you take a plugin. Put your stuff on the page using a short code back in the day, and it looks like nothing, right? And then the plugin says, oh, it’s the theme’s fault, and the theme says, no, it’s the plugin’s fault. And you’re just, okay, let’s just forget about it.

And then when you are a developer, you can fix it. But when you’re not a developer, it’s terribly frustrating because maybe you bought the theme, and maybe you bought a plugin, and everybody’s just saying it’s the other person’s fault. And that’s just not the great situation.

And so if it is a block, it can integrate into this existing design system. Hopefully it gives you a few options to customize stuff. But generally, if you drop a block into Twenty Twenty Two, and then Twenty Twenty Five, and the block is quite unopinionated, it’s going to look somewhat like the theme. It’s never going to be close, especially if you have very complicated blocks like the obvious slider, you know, people love sliders, so that’s more difficult to handle.

But there are a lot of very basic blocks, like in an LMS, a course list, course title, that kind of stuff, where we can have a lot of compatibility with themes just out of the box. And you always need to understand the problems of the past to understand the solutions to take right now. And WordPress still is, even with block themes, can be very hard to use, right?

Because this doesn’t work with this, this doesn’t work with that. So we need to really simplify and agree on the common set of interfaces, a common set of programming interfaces, a common set of just ways that we build things, and blocks help with that.

But the difficulty in that is that WordPress, for a long time, the philosophy was more, there’s zero in it, right? So if you install WordPress 4.9, there’s nothing in it. And WordPress was just, hey, I’m going to give you these programming interfaces, and then you do whatever you want.

So the customiser was like that. So you take the customiser and then you build your controls that you want. But then you have the problem that different themes have different controls. When you switch themes, it breaks.

And so now WordPress is taking the exact opposite way, where it’s saying, no, we are going to agree on this set of tools. It’s going to be handled this way. It’s very opinionated. And more than the technical issues, it’s just this opinionated version of how the WordPress admin should look that is causing problems.

And the thing is with the SaaS, when you subscribe to some platform and you do change the interface, well, you like it or you don’t like it, it’s not our problem. If you don’t like it, then leave. That’s essentially their solution to solving that problem, because when they change interfaces, their bet is that more people going to like it than people are going to dislike it, so they’re going to be fine. But still the opinion is that, hey, if you don’t like it then leave, we don’t care.

And so we in WordPress have the problem that we do want people to stay around for a long time. We need to give people those tools where they don’t need third party tools to do very basic things. And it’s the same for WordPress, also same for WooCommerce, right? It’s both having a lot of other platforms competing with them. And we need to give people the tools that they need to really have a site that stays around for a very long time.

[00:33:55] Nathan Wrigley: I guess there’s a few problems, isn’t there? Firstly that the SaaS platforms have complete control over the architecture of all the things. So they know everything that’s going on with every one of their clients. Whereas WordPress, who knows what’s going on with any one of the millions of websites? What the dependencies are, what hosting it’s on, what range of plugins it’s got going on in there. So it has to be much more slowly, slowly, gently. Just try to make sure that everything is backwards compatible.

But also when you kind of muddle up the way a site looks with the content, so the design and the content is put into the same interface, there’s potential for everything to go wrong there as well.

Certainly at the moment, I really do like the endeavors of locking things within blocks, so that the designers, if they’ve got the technical capacity to get in there and figure out how to lock different aspects, they can hand over, kind of like boilerplate templates for pages if you like, drop things in. You can change the text here, but you can’t change the background. The colors are fixed, but the font, that’s okay, you can change that. All of that seems to be adding to a much more complete solution as well.

Whereas in the more recent past, if you hand over something to a client, they’ve basically been able to destroy everything just by clicking around in the interface. Whereas now, hopefully in the near future, more of those locking things will be possible so that, like I said, you can make it so that they can’t change this thing, or the other thing as well.

[00:35:14] Fränk Klein: Right. I think we can talk a lot about the tech, and the tech is important, but the tech is just that. And the technology never comes first. It’s always the demand for the technology that precedes it.

And when we look at the agency world, you kind of have the two extremes. On the one hand, you have agencies that say, I’m going to build your website, if you need to change anything, call me, send me an email, and we’re going to change it for you.

And that’s certainly a model that works up to a certain point, because if you do request a lot of changes on the website, then it becomes pricey from a certain point. But what we now see in the larger companies is that from a certain point on, the marketing’s not going to be done by an agency, the market is going to be done in house. And those people in the marketing world, they are used to things like HubSpot Pages, all these tools that are out there to ClickFunnels for example, and they take that for granted.

And they might even not know WordPress depending on where they’ve been, or what the age is even. And so they come into WordPress and then they say, I want to build this landing page for this campaign, and then their boss says, yeah, I’m going to call up our agency and then say, yeah, give me a design. Then we’re going to hand code it, it’s going to take us a week. Then I say, okay, no, it’s not going to take a week for me there to build a campaign because I need to build a lot of landing pages.

And so that is the thing that’s changed that with marketers taking a liking to WordPress, and also being more involved with that, we need to give them the tools that they need. So the challenge that WordPress has is that it needs to correspond to that really use case where you have people that know how to use this tool, that want to build landing pages, want nearly complete control over the website, and that don’t want to pay an agency to do it, and they want to be fast and quick.

And then the, I guess, path in the middle where you have maybe end users, or people that are updating the website like a restaurant, classic scenario, do you need to update their menu of the week? Where we need to offer them an interface that is easy to understand, but locked down so that they can go in and, on Monday this is the menu of the day, so that they can change those few things quite easily while keeping the design intact.

But it’s also more, you have the tools and WordPress can give you that content locking, that design locking, all of those tools are built in. But the other part is also that every agency needs to kind of customise WordPress a bit. For example, what you can do is, when you log into WP admin, you have the possibility to register a custom widget there. So you register a widget and then you say, hey, change the menu, and it leads you directly to that page where you can edit that.

So it’s little things like that end user experience where you can make it a lot simpler. And the challenge is that if you’re used to WordPress makes total sense because use it every day. But we really need to take a step back and think about the people that don’t use it every day, and say, okay, what can I customise in here to make this a lot smoother?

So the challenges right now is, for sure the tech is a challenge, but tech is very solvable, right? I can teach anybody to do anything technically. But that user experience aspect, that’s really hard to do. Teaching somebody to design effective user interfaces, that’s a totally different skill to just being technical, and we need to have both at this time.

[00:38:11] Nathan Wrigley: We know that you are very technical, you’re working for an enterprise agency, and you are teaching this content. So we could have the conversation about what we would hope the project, WordPress itself, would do differently. But remove that, we are where we are.

But personally, looking back over the last five, six years of what you have done, have you gone down any blind alleys? Have you made any missteps that you think with hindsight, oh, I would’ve done that differently?

I don’t know, with your courses, just released content which then got completely upended by something that Core did. Or perhaps, I don’t know, advocate for something that was a blind alley and never got taken on. So it’s more a question of not what Core did, but what you did, and how that worked out.

[00:38:53] Fränk Klein: Yeah, so there’s two angles to it. So for the course it’s definitely. So I thought, well, this is a feature I like it. Full Site Editing is really great, because I published it in 2021. That was when they started work in just the plugin for a while. That wasn’t the plugin, so obviously it changed a lot. Then it landed in Core, and then we had a theme.

So I did a release for 5.8, which was just the underlying APIs without the site editor. That was on theme json version one, okay. So great. 5.9 hits, a V2 comes out, which as somebody who’s using it, the difference is zero. But as somebody who shows it, I cannot have a video where it says at the top, oh, this is V1, right? So I need to re record that.

And then now we are on V3. So yeah, I had to redo the course. I mean there have been three complete redos, and then every time that the new release comes out, pretty much have replaced between 20 to 40% of the lessons. And it’s not interface updates, but it’s more, now it’s not reusable blocks, now it’s patterns, sync patterns, partially synced patterns. Block bindings, now there’s a UI.

So that’s just the technical part, but the other part is more that you can use it for this, you can use it for that. It’s all of those tricks that I find out, I put in there. So really it’s more like a recipe. For example, when the content only editing comes in, then it’s when I go, this is what it does, and this is what I would recommend that to use.

So yeah, courses are not passive income by any means. But it has given me a lot in terms of just interacting with the people, seeing what they’re doing. I’ve learned a lot just from the people that I talk to. Because it’s not that I come up with this stuff all on my own. For sure, certain things I do my own research, and I know that from all projects, but a lot of stuff just comes from the people that are in the course.

It’s more the other part, did I do anything wrong where I would say afterwards, would’ve done it this way? Sure, but there wasn’t anything terribly off. But it’s also my personality is that if you do teach things, obviously you like learning things, because you need to learn something to teach it. Yeah, I just have a high barrier for frustration. But that’s just me because as a principal engineer, those are the highest paid engineers in the organisation. And so if you want that kind of money, you need to bring something to the table.

And so stuff is always difficult, whether it’s Full Site Editing, some kind of architecture stuff. So the whole thing is always just hard. So if that’s your day to day, it’s different than to somebody who, for a long time has just been building with the same stuff, and there weren’t many challenges. And now this is all changing and they’re like, oh wow, what’s going on? You know, this is all very difficult.

But that’s why there are stuff like course and tutorials, right? Somebody does the hard work for you and just follow along. So that’s a thing.

But what would actually, the biggest growth that I’ve seen is that when we talk about just what we do every day, you have to understand your clients in order to build a solution for them that is great. Because you have two types of developers. One developer just sits there and the client says, do this, and they do it, and that’s it.

The other develop is more, the client says, do this, and then they’re saying like, why do you want this? Should it be this way? Should it be that way? Because a client cannot know as much about workers as you do. So obviously your opinion usually is better than theirs because they don’t have the technical background.

But you also need to understand their needs. You need to understand their need without accepting their solution of it. And that’s really where I’ve done a lot of learning just also because of my course. You know, I have to do email marketing. How does email marketing work? I have zero clue. Just the tech of it. What do you write? What do people want to read? I have to look at analytics. I have to build sales pages. What goes on the sales page? And so all of that, now I have a lot more respect for marketing people because it’s a very, very hard job.

And so that has been the biggest growth for me. Also writers, you know I write a lot. Previously when I did projects back in 2015, I used WordPress, but I didn’t write. So anything that they say to me was, I use it this way, and I didn’t have an idea of what they meant, because I wasn’t creating a lot of content in WordPress. I was just writing code.

Now that I do create content I understand, okay. This is hard, that is hard. This is difficult. So it’s more that being closer to your clients and their needs that has allowed me to have that bigger growth. And also the challenge when it comes to building custom blocks, people get hung up, oh, it’s JavaScript. Yes, but so what? I mean, JavaScript is very learnable. It’s the most popular language out there. React is super popular. There are literally hundreds of thousands of people that are doing React.

But the hard part is that, how do I build that block? What should it look like? What is the dialogue? What is the state when I put it in? Should it be in the sidebar? Should it be here? Just a slider. A slider on the front end, everybody knows what it looks like. But how do you represent six slides in the backend? You put them one below the other. Should there be a toggle? Should you be able to drag things? Is it all just one editing mask? Should you be able to move things around?

So those are really the hard challenges right now, and that you only get when you actually talk to people of how they use WordPress. And I think that’s perspective is missing unfortunately, a lot in the community.

[00:43:26] Nathan Wrigley: I’m glad that there are people like you who are giving that plenty of thought so that you can presumably contribute back, and give your opinions on how things should go from the admin side of things.

Fränk, just before we say thank you and adieu, do you want to just drop a couple of links? Maybe a website where you can be found, or a, I don’t know, social media handle where people can get in touch with you if they wish to.

[00:43:48] Fränk Klein: Yes. My website is wpdevelopment.courses, quite easy. Then I’m on X at fklux. So yeah, the rest we’re going to put into the show notes.

[00:43:58] Nathan Wrigley: Okay, well, I will do that. Go to wptavern.com/podcast and search for the episode with Fränk Klein, and all of the links will be in the show notes there. So Fränk, once more, thank you so much for chatting to me today. I really appreciate it.

[00:44:13] Fränk Klein: Thank you very much.

On the podcast today we have Fränk Klein.

Fränk is a principal engineer at Human Made and brings a wealth of experience from his extensive history with WordPress, having started with the platform in 2011. He previously worked at Automattic and now directs his expertise towards WP Development Courses, where he teaches block theme and custom block development.

Fränk talks about the modernization of PHP within WordPress, a topic that often gets overshadowed by the hype around JavaScript. We get into Human Made’s work, an enterprise-focused WordPress agency renowned for serving high-profile clients such as the Harvard Gazette and TechCrunch. Fränk explains the intricate custom backend development needed to meet the complex requirements of enterprise clients, like sophisticated editorial workflows for clients like banks.

Fränk provides a comprehensive breakdown of the Gutenberg project’s four phases: content editing, site customization, collaborative editing, and multilingual capabilities. We explore how FSE is transforming WordPress by integrating new editing tools and modernising the admin interface, moving the platform from its classic roots to a more dynamic, block-based editing environment.

Fränk shares his unique perspective on the challenges and rewards of engineering and teaching within the WordPress ecosystem. He stresses the importance of understanding client needs and the necessity for developers to engage in continuous learning.

We also talk about using traditional WordPress solutions and third-party page builders like Bricks, Beaver Builder, and Elementor. Fränk argues for the streamlined, block-based systems offered by WordPress Core, citing both financial and technical benefits.

Our conversation continues into the broader implications of WordPress’s ongoing evolution; the significant admin interface redesign and its impact on users and agencies. Fränk discusses the challenges users face with these changes and the importance of improving communication within the WordPress community to facilitate smoother transitions.

Towards the end, Fränk talks about his experiences with course creation and content maintenance, particularly given the fast-paced changes in WordPress features. He emphasises the need for a solid grasp of foundational web development concepts to fully leverage the platform’s evolving tools.

If you’re keen on understanding how full site editing and other WordPress innovations can enhance your projects, and wish to gain insights into the evolving WordPress landscape, this episode is for you.

Useful links

Human Made

WP Development Courses

Harvard Gazette

TechCrunch

We Called it Gutenberg for a Reason

Learn WordPress

Developer Blog

Is WordPress for Old People? Podcast with Josh Hall and Mark Szymanski

Bricks

Beaver Builder

Elementor

Notion

HubSpot Pages

ClickFunnels

Fränk on X