These are the meeting notes from the block-based themes meeting on January 5, 2022.
The meeting agenda can be found here. Thank you @jeffikus for preparing the agenda. The meeting was facilitated by @danieldudzic, and the notes were taken by @mikachan. You can read the full transcript on our #themereview channel.
Block-based themes issues for WordPress 5.9
There are no critical issues remaining relating to block themes for WordPress 5.9. Here’s a link to the WordPress 5.9 Must-Haves.
@kjellr confirmed that just about all of the critical issues Twenty Twenty-Two encountered have made it in already.
There was one issue around site padding that we were unable to find a good solution for in Gutenberg, but for now, we have included a solution in the theme that works pretty well until we find a way to handle it in Gutenberg.
This issue is still a little up in the air and is a common issue to all block themes. If folks have any thoughts on that, it would be great to get some perspective on the issue. Please join in the discussion over on GitHub.
The future of block theming
There have been a lot of discussions happening around the topic of theme developers and the next stage of block theming.
We discussed the future of block theming, covering the following ideas, thoughts, and questions:
- What would a premium block theme look like? The biggest value from the premium space is in custom patterns, global style variations, block styles, templates, and support.
- Themes are going back to being just ‘themes’, i.e. only incorporating the styling, rather than needing to include further functionality that should really be provided by a plugin.
- Themes will be easier to switch between, as there will be less to configure, move, or potentially lose during the switching process.
- If a theme only includes styling, does the word ‘theme’ cause any legacy problems?
- Are base theme files still important if they are becoming more and more similar?
- The next stage of block theming involves figuring out ways to improve the integration process of themes into Gutenberg core, and developing tools that allow for better management of this process.
We don’t have many answers yet, but it’s great to start thinking about these things now. Thank you to everyone who contributed to the discussion!