Gutenberg Phase 2 and the Future of WordPress Themes

As someone who makes a living selling themes the recent outline for Phase 2 of Gutenberg is is an interesting article to read. I’ve been wondering about the long term future of themes for a while; and to be honest I am quite pessimistic. But first, let’s look at it from a website owners perspective.

Phase 2 is the continuation of converting WordPress over to a block based editor. Widgets, and menus, will become blocks. This means that all widgets can be used when building posts and pages; and equally that blocks can be used when building sidebars.

For users this is fantastic! Everything that is possible in one place, will be possible in others. In the future it will be even better. As displayed in the section titled ‘Editing blocks in-context’, it is likely that front-end editing will be coming to WordPress. Presumably this will mean you can browse your site, press edit post/ edit page, and then edit almost anything right there.

This will be so much easier – as a user I am really excited for it.

But themes; how will they fair?

*

My concern with the move to WordPress being a site builder is that WordPress sites will end up being a single, boring, homogenous layout. One, maybe two, columns, with loads of blocks stacked on top of each other. Since the people building the websites will not be designers, creative and original designs will be considerably reduced.

If we look at the findings and recommendations from the recent user research session we will see that one of the things that was found is confusion between layout and styles. The structure of the pages, and the fonts and colours used.

The way I interpreted this is that the suggestion is for WordPress to take care of the page structure and themes would be limited to styles. This matches with suggestions from ThemeShaper, where it’s suggested that themes could be defined in a json file (presumably with some CSS). It also pairs up with conversations I have had with the WordPress.com team, who are leading the development of Gutenberg.

As someone who has been involved with WordPress theme development since 2005 (14 years!). I have seen a lot of things change. My first theme, Regulus, included an admin panel that let you show and hide elements of the sidebar. This was before widgets existed. As far as I know Regulus was the first public theme to include a control panel.

My first premium theme was Mimbo Pro; a theme that showed WordPress could be used for more than just blogs. Featured images had been included in themes before (using custom fields) but we included automatic image resizing with TimThumb. Quite an innovation at the time and soon used in many other themes.

But, how can we innovate when themes are, potentially, going to be a JSON file?

It’s really hard to do creative, innovative things with a platform that is changing as fast as WordPress is at the moment. I’m a fan of change, and think the coming changes are mostly positive for users. But to build a product based business on top of a platform that is changing as much as WordPress is, is not easy.

Was it good/ useful/ a load of old rubbish? Let me know on Mastodon, or BlueSky (or Twitter X if you must).

Link to this page

Thanks for reading. I'd really appreciate it if you'd link to this page if you mention it in your newsletter or on your blog.

WordPress News

The latest WordPress updates from the WPBriefs Podcast.

Related Posts

14 Jun 2020

WP Cafe – Developing Themes with Gutenberg

Last week I took part in the first WP Cafe with Keith and Mark from Highrise Digital. The subject was Gutenberg, the new WordPress editor, and talking about the work we have done with it.Below is the video from the...
13 Nov 2005

Regulus – New WordPress Theme released

Regulus has it’s own theme page here. You can also download Regulus.Towards the end of the Bubble Blitz development I started work on my first WordPress theme. The making of it kind of stopped and started for quite a while...
22 Sep 2019

The End of WordPress Themes is in Sight

It’s been a long time coming.I currently earn a living selling WordPress themes. In a couple of years that won’t be the case. I might be earning something from themes, but themes as we know them will no-longer be made.In...
13 May 2010

6 Tips to Build Better WordPress Themes

If you want to make WordPress themes, for clients, to release for free or to sell, then there are a lot of factors you need to take into consideration. Below are some hints and tips that should help ease your...
01 Apr 2015

The State of WordPress Themes #wcldn

I recently spoke on a panel at WordCamp London 2015e. Lance – who used to be the Theme Team lead at WordPress.com – asked me if I wanted to speak on a panel with him at WordCamp London 2015. I’ve...
27 May 2013

WordPress: 10 Years Young, What Does The Future Hold?

WordPress is now 10 years old. I started using wordpress 9 years ago – which means I joined the WordPress community early on. The reason I chose WordPress is simply because of the fabled 5 minute install process – I...