{"id":20823,"date":"2019-05-14T11:30:13","date_gmt":"2019-05-14T11:30:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.heartinternet.uk\/blog\/?p=20823"},"modified":"2019-05-14T11:30:13","modified_gmt":"2019-05-14T11:30:13","slug":"what-does-gutenberg-ready-mean-for-wordpress-themes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.heartinternet.uk\/blog\/what-does-gutenberg-ready-mean-for-wordpress-themes\/","title":{"rendered":"What does \u2018Gutenberg-ready\u2019 mean for WordPress themes?"},"content":{"rendered":"

The theory is: Gutenberg, the new block editor, works with any WordPress theme out of the box. It only changes the editing experience but not how content is stored and then rendered on the front-end by the theme.<\/p>\n

Mind you, if you use a third-party page-builder like Beaver Builder<\/a>, Divi<\/a>, Elementor<\/a>, or WPBakery<\/a> to name a few, coupled with a theme, you will have to connect with the page builders\u2019 developers and inquire about their Gutenberg-readiness. While the block editor has been the default editor for the last three months, I have seen some major adjustments for a co-existence between third-party page builders and Core\u2019s Classic and Block editors.<\/p>\n

There are also a few very popular themes in the Themeforest Marketplace (for example Avada<\/a> and Enfold<\/a>) that have their own proprietary methods of creating and storing content. Their developers mostly suggest to install the Classic Editor plugin to make their themes work again with a WordPress 5.x version.<\/p>\n

How long will the Classic Editor be around? The Core Team published the \u201cguaranteed supported until date\u201d as 31 December 2021<\/a> (so roughly another two and a half years) .<\/p>\n

Beyond these two caveats, third-party page builders and content lock-in theme architecture, it should work out of the box.<\/p>\n

Baseline support, enhancements, extend and customise<\/h3>\n

\u201cThe new Blocks include baseline support in all themes, enhancements to opt-in to and the ability to extend and customize.\u201d <\/em><\/p>\n

That\u2019s how the developer handbook for the block editor starts its Theme Support chapter.<\/a><\/p>\n

In other words, there are a few features the block editor offers, that might not be available yet for your theme and your site, so it\u2019s not pure binary, works or doesn\u2019t work. There are multiple levels of Gutenberg-readiness.<\/p>\n

It goes from enabling Align-wide and Align-full styling for the various blocks (columns, images, cover, gallery), to include styling for each core block to providing custom colour and font-size pickers for your customers content creators, so they stay within the brands boundaries.<\/p>\n

In this article, I\u2019ll talk about all these different ways your theme can interact with the block editor. We\u2019ll talk about stylesheets, CSS specificity and layout. There are voices, and mine is among them, that building blocks are the domains of plugins. Themes provide the glue between features and front-end, and a site owner should be able to switch out their theme without losing content or composition. Of course, like everything else in life, the edges are blurry and the block editor is still in its infancy.<\/p>\n

Here is what we\u2019re going to look at:<\/p>\n