Hallway Hangout: Let’s chat about the Future of Custom CSS with block themes


This is a summary of a Hallway Hangout that was wrangled in the #fse-outreach-experiment channel as part of the FSE Outreach Program. Thank you to everyone who joined in!

Attendance:

Daisy Olsen, Justin Tadlock, Anne McCarthy, Michael Burridge, JuanMa Garrido, Damon Cook, Rich Tabor, Jessica Lyschik, Paal Joachim Romdahl, Birgit Pauli-Haack, Ganga Kafle.

Video Recording:

Topics:

General Updates

Future of Custom CSS discussion

  • We discussed the issue around
    Global Styles: Allow saving, importing, exporting, copying from another theme without switching to it
    which quickly brought up the topic of saving issues and needing a more robust auto-save system. This is particularly true to have just after perhaps importing and switching to different styles, depending on how saving works.
    • Concerns immediately around color naming and how this will actually work came up.
  • We went through some prior art around block theme switching in general from a prior FSE Program exploration.
  • We went over the Global Styles: an input for custom CSS and Global styles – per-block custom css issues as they both interconnect. Two questions came up here:
  • Once more the topic of revisions came up with the custom CSS options as well. Overall, folks felt this will greatly help with the adoption of block themes and helps bring parity to the experience, while also expressing concerns around UI overload.
  • We then switched to talking about the keeping up with block theme changes in general where Rich Tabor brought up an interesting bug/use case around block themes where switching to a style variation keeps you “frozen in time” in terms of additional updates to the theme. You have to switch to the default style and switch back for updates to occur. A regular check to ensure updates are propagated/able to be opted into would be great.
  • We lightly touched on layout controls and recent work there to stay up to date with Justin Tadlock mentioning that he always sticks to core in order to manage layout to make maintenance easier.
  • Finally, we ended talking about the new split in the block settings sidebar with questions around how folks might adopt this and needing to show best practices when that does happen.

#fse-hallway-hangout