Every year, WordPress releases a new theme. Most years, I try to update my site to use this theme. I find this a great way to explore WordPress—the software I work with professionally on a daily basis—from a user perspective.

The Twenty Twenty-Two theme was the first one to introduce full site editing, as I talked about here, and so much has changed since then. Here is an overview of what I thought of the process to move to Twenty Twenty-Five.

Colours and logo

In the past years, I’ve used the same logo but with a different colour. It started to feel old, so I changed that. I’m now just simply using the Blinker font. For my site icon, I continued with that. I explicitly included the .blog there as this domain was a gift from my company and I think this is a nice way to draw attention to this TLD as an option.

Contrary to previous years, I went for more muted, earthy colours. It seems to reflect me quite well right now.

Templating

Templating is no longer in its infancy stage. Editing the templates has become so easy, and as a result, a whole lot more fun to do. Setting up my site took only a few hours, and I edited quite a bit.

For contrast, with the Twenty Twenty theme, I had to write a bunch of custom CSS to create a grid template limited to my photography archive. While I now don’t have a separate setup for that archive, doing so would be 10 minutes of work or so.

One of the other things that I keep enjoying is the option to create synced patterns. For example, I’ve now added a template to all cake topper posts I’ve made (see the latest one here). If I add a new post for my kids’ next cake toppers, I can just edit this template, and automatically it will now be connected to all existing posts with the template on it.

I’m particularly happy with my 404 page; it shows how silly my level of humour is. (But I’m a dad, so I guess. that’s okay.)

CSS is dead, long live CSS

On the note of CSS, one of the things that I used to pride myself in is that I’ve learnt CSS quite deeply by myself. I’ve been able to contribute code this way to several projects, including WooCommerce and WordPress.

Recently, it’s become increasingly clear that my CSS is getting rusty: blocks are making it unnecessary for me to keep up to date. I can go and feel sorry for myself, but learning CSS came from a gap: I wanted my site and theme to be customised to a degree that its features and functions did not let me. That gap is—mostly—gone: block editing has taken over.

That said, block styling uses the terminology from CSS, so styling a site via blocks is easier for someone who knows CSS. For example, you can change the padding and the margin in blocks, but my hunch is that many people won’t know what the difference is if they’ve never worked with CSS.

Structure

One of my favourite things is the Document Overview option. Especially on more complex designs, the overview makes it really easy to find where there are unnecessary levels.

I for example often find myself creating groups within groups within groups. Reviewing a template or page via the overview makes is extremely simple to spot and fix those. You can drag the right grouping to a higher level and then delete the unnecessary ones.

Quirks

That does not mean everything is smooth sailing. Here are a few things that I still found tricky.

What? Who? Where?

The difference between pages, templates, and patterns often feels arbitrary. It further was sometimes unclear why certain elements were easy to edit and others weren’t.

For example, I do not like the avatar alignment of threaded comments, but I have no clue where or how I would change that without the use of custom code.

Similarly, finding out where to edit the pattern/template for quote and code blocks took me a while. 💡 Tip: It’s because that’s a style and can be found under Style > Edit > Blocks.

A third example is that choosing a menu can be found only when clicking on the ellipsis next to the menu block settings. I went on a wild goose chase more than once to find out how to do this again.

Mobile

This may be my limited knowledges, but I find the stacking of groups on mobile also quite the missing, especially when images are involved. For example, the profile picture on my About Me page looks good on desktop, but on mobile it’s just awkward.

In conclusion

The options with blocks are so incredibly promising. Creating a site with a custom feel would’ve taken me days to make a few years ago, and now that is reduced to mere hours. I would highly recommend the videos of my colleague Jamie that give an insight into the wide possibilities of blocks and block themes. He recently published his favourite cool block designs with links to the tutorials (go to YouTube to get those).

Next to that, you should really watch some of the speed builds: two WordPressers take each other on in recreating famous, high-end websites with the block editor. While they are more experienced in WordPress than the average site builder, it shows how amazing the block editor is. I witnessed the live build at WordCamp Europe and was blown away by the option to fix one column while scrolling the second — you can see the effect in the video at around 16 minutes.