Philip Gledhill asked 3 years ago
Shawn Hesketh answered 3 years ago
Hi Philip,
You're absolutely correct. WordPress 6.0 continues the development of Full Site Editing, which was first released in WordPress 5.9. As you know, Twenty Twenty-Two is a completely different kind of theme than we've ever seen in WordPress before. It's a “block theme,” which means it supports Full Site Editing.
Block themes, or FSE themes, no longer utilize the Customizer. Instead, they use the new Theme Editor, which promises to allow site owners to create their own headers, footers, and page layouts.
However, Full Site Editing is still very much in its infancy, which is why it carries the “beta” label. It's not ready for prime time just yet. And there are currently just 72 themes that support Full Site Editing. Compare that to the tens of thousands of themes that are available today that don't support Full Site Editing.
This means that the vast majority of site owners will not have Full Site Editing enabled, but will continue to see the Customizer as they have for years now.
Rather than creating unecessary confusion for site owners by re-recording all of our videos to cover Full Site Editing, we've decided to continue maintaining our current WordPress 101 course... but we are creating a handful of videos that will provide a basic introduction to Full Site Editing for anyone who wants to live on the edge and try it now.
So, in answer to your question, yes, we do plan to create videos for the Twenty Twenty-Two theme and more specifically, Full Site Editing. But it will be a while longer before we update the entire WordPress 101 course to cover it in depth.
This is the first time in our 14-year history we've departed from our strategy of always supporting the “out-of-the-box” WordPress experience. Until the core team has finalized the UI and resolved the many bugs and accessibility issues with Full Site Editing, we feel it's more helpful to cover the experience that the majority of WordPress users will have today.
Stay tuned for the new videos!
Philip Gledhill
replied 3 years ago Thanks Shawn
I agree, “Twenty Twenty-Two really is a completely different kind of theme”.
I fully understand your reasoning for creating just a few Full Site Editing videos in the short term, this makes sense.
I think the advantages of block patterns and the new page template creating tools will make big theme shops want to embrace FSE as soon as the new WordPress site editor gets out of beta mode.
Let’s hope this three and a half year upgrade path soon settles down to a stable tool that we can learn with confidence.
mbergen
replied 3 years ago I wish this had been made clear when I bought my membership. I’m new to WP and struggling since my default installation uses the Full Site editor and what I’ve learned from your videos does not match. I don’t want to pay for a commercial theme (like Astra, which you recommended in your email) until I know what I’m doing, what I’ll use/want, etc. so I’m using the default 2022 theme.
Shawn Hesketh
replied 3 years ago Hey Michael,
This is very much in flux right now. We will happily include videos for Full Site Editing as soon as it exits the beta testing phase. Right now, it carries a ‘Beta” label, becaase it is very much still in its infancy. It’s not ready for prime time just yet, and we cannot advocate for using it to build your site in its current state.
That said, you don’t have to pay for a commercial theme, if you don’t want to. There are over 5,000 free themes in the WordPress.org theme directory, and just 90 of them support Full Site Editing.
But if you’re just learning WordPress, your best bet would be to use the Twenty Twenty theme. It’s another of the default WordPress themes included in every new site, and it’s the theme we use in the current version of our WordPress 101 video tutorials. If you activate that theme, you’ll be able to follow along with our tutorials just fine.
Hope this helps!
Shawn
Hi I have just purchased this membership as I wanted to learn how to make simple updates to my website. This morning I was trying to create a new page and my version of WordPress looks different to the one in the videos and saw a link – Update wordpress 6.0 which I clicked and my website has crashed. When I try login I get a white screen with an error message “There has been a critical error on this website” Please help how can I retrieve my website!!!! Thank you kindly
Shawn Hesketh
replied 3 years ago Hi Adeleine,
So sorry to hear you’re having trouble with your WordPress website. We always recommend that you create a backup of your site before updating the core software, plugins, or themes.
Where is your site hosted? Most WordPress hosts these days automatically create nightly backups for just this sort of event. You should be able to reach out to your hosting provider for support restoring your website to the previous version.
Hope this helps point you in the right direction!