Ben
Ben is a lifelong Nintendo fan who likes to build websites, and make video games. He buys way too much Lego.
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 this article Matias Ventura details a proposal for the future of the block editor. WordPress is quite quickly turning into a site builder, giving users the power to control exactly how their site functions. Themes will be reduced to stylesheets, and maybe some json/ php that describes the default layout and positions.
There’s been no mention of this anywhere else, but I wonder if the stylesheet aspect of themes will also be consumed into core and themes will be deprecated. Stylesheets will be relegated to selecting fonts, and colours; and setting sizes and spacings. Gutenberg will take care of the layout. This could easily be done by a plugin or in core directly. There are definite benefits to doing this from a user’s perspective – they will have full control of their site – but it’s going to result in some very boring website layouts.
Currently the HTML WordPress spits out is a little random. There’s no consistency in terms of the structure or elements used. There’s also no consistency in terms of the classnames given to things. Anyone hoping to develop a pattern library for a WordPress product is going to find it hard work.
I’d love to create a WordPress design system but WordPress isn’t designed in the right way, and it would be hard to change since there’s so much legacy content. I hope the Gutenberg team consider this and build things so that this is possible.
But, then we will also have to contend with all the different block plugins that are going to spring up. Without standardized page structures theme designers will be unable to design reusable elements for all the blocks. At the moment big plugins like WooCommerce, or BuddyPress, are relatively easy to style since they control the whole page. But in the future you could be using blocks from 10 different developers on a single page. There’s no way theme designers can make that look like it all belongs together.
So I think this will lead to really interesting things. Obviously I’m looking at this slightly selfishly since this will directly impact my income. However, it will also affect everyone who uses WordPress. All WordPress sites need a theme.
It’s going to be a while before this enters core, and even longer before everyone adopts it, so developers and agencies have a while to prepare for the future. And I definitely think we should be thinking ahead. I said this during the development of Gutenberg and I’m sure I’ll say it again: we really need to consider where WordPress is (or might be) heading.
This will directly affect how theme developers and designers work. What plugin developers need to work with. How agencies need to work (and what training they will need to do).
This story first appeared in MasterWP, a weekly newsletter for WordPress professionals.
“All WordPress sites need a theme.”
That sounds like a challenge 🙂
Insightful article Ben! I hope you try out Elementor one day, it let’s you build your entire site not tomorrow but today. Some Web Creators even offer Template Kits that can be used by a non-coder to quickly set up an entire (even dynamic) website.
Ps. Full disclosure, I’ve been a huge Elementor fan since the beginning so you might consider my opinion slightly more than biased 🙂
I love Elementor and recently have been hooked with Gutenberg as well. I think themes will need to evolve and provide more smarter objects, blocks etc.
Horror scenario. Another reason to hate Gutenberg and how it is being forced upon us.
A lot of people thought this was coming for a very long time. I did, I even delayed things in the theme review team with the expectation that news would come down and we would be redundant. I spent a full year expecting that to occur but so far is has not.
We don’t know what role themes have in the future. Surely it will change as they have done in the past. Making them only a stylesheet would require a pretty significant change to how all of WordPress output is handled. So far I do not see that work being done in core.
So ‘maybe soon’ is when there will be news about themes being at their end but so far I have heard nothing to indicate that’s the intended direction 🙂
A good read! I had this situation and future of themes at the back of my mind for a year now. Still curious to see what is going to happen to the MAJOR theme shops, but mostly, what is going to happen to marketplaces like Theme Forest.
Interesting post. As a WordPress enthusiast I have been using & watching closely this platform for almost a decade. My guess is when the current Gutenberg project is completed, it might look like Microsoft publisher!!! (a simplified analogy) where user can create anything they want! Of course there would be lot of templates, just like MS Publisher does! I could be wrong though, watching curiously!
Hey there,
a short notice! Robert Windisch – known as the men with the Head – has predicted this since last year also we – a german WordPress Podcast “wp-sofa” – published a extra episode to this topic. Take a look for episode 49 or search for “themes werden sterben”.
But the thing is, we talked in “WP Sofa – WordPress News #35 – KW 38/19” about a real theme tasks in the future. There are some ideas about how themes will grow.
At last – themes will not die – themes will do only design stuff not more!
Oh yeah. And I think about it all with a little bit of anxiety. TNX!
“All WordPress sites need a theme.”
Hmmmmmm….
https://oxygenbuilder.com/
I’m not wrong. Unless you are suggesting that you can use that without a theme activated?
Oxygen doesn’t use a theme – if you have one activated, oxygen will disable it anyway.
Well that’s really interesting. Not something I thought was possible with WordPress.
Hey Ben,
Read this piece a few weeks ago, and wanted to finally make a comment now that I’ve finished up some related work.
Our new Gutenberg-based themes are a lot like you describe. They only power universal header/footer elements and the brand style. Most of the our landing page layouts are powered with a blocks plugin that we designed and released to be used with many themes–not just our own.
The time we took to separate some of the layout components from theme style components has really paid off for us and our clients, but I can understand the pain in starting over cause I just went through it too.
The new editor makes it easier for us to compete with Squarespace, and our clients are extremely happy with the overall editing experience because it’s way easier to use. They take up less of our time with questions since they’re seeing what they’re editing in Gutenberg, and they use their sites more often.
My personal experience with the editor as both a developer and content creator has given me a similar experience. I can’t imagine going back to old ACF layouts and tons of settings pages.
In my opinion, the easier we can make WordPress to use, the more likely people are to create for/on WP as a platform. Slowly but surely, my hope is that people begin to ween off of parasitic sites like Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn for their content and community and lean more towards these small communities that pop up around sites made with tools like WordPress.
I’m likely more optimistic than most, but I think you should be too Ben!
All the best!
Hey Tim – thanks for the feedback. I really like the block editor – not sure if that was clear from the article. My main concern is that, in the longer term, there won’t be much need (possibly no need) for theme developers.
Thank you for this great piece! I think you bring up some valid points, especially thinking about considering the future. If we don’t plan the future when it comes to development and WordPress – we won’t know what chance we have of ending in any certain place. As always, the internet is a place of adaptability – and surely, things continue to change so rapidly.