Editing

Full Site Editing or FSE is something that’s been touted loudly in recent months. It became popular with recent releases of WordPress and continues to get more robust as other releases come out. Maybe a better way to say it is that it gets more mature.

In order to take advantage of FSE you have to be using a theme that is enabled for it which is a block theme. That was something I didn’t understand initially and so full site editing was difficult for me and didn’t work like it did in the tutorials I’d watched. I’ve been waiting for that “ah ha!” moment where it all clicks in place, but that moment never really came. Rather, using different editors and things like that, you kind of chisel away at it piece by piece until all of your blocks form a website. In theory, it’s pretty simple. But we know how well “theory” works in the real world.

One of the things that is most helpful to me is having a “lab” site or a sandbox that you can play with, because that’s exactly what has to happen here in order to learn this stuff. In my case, that’s a subdomain off of SuttonsNest, but you can do that any number of ways. I find it beneficial to work in a “real” site as opposed to something like Local by Flywheel or Desktop Server although both of those are excellent tools depending on the need. There’s just something about having a site on a server that you can access the way you will when something is in production, and if you’re testing out forms and things like that.

When you have a work bench or a sandbox, there’s really not a good, straight forward tutorial that I’ve found for building sites. But the value in playing with FSE in a real WordPress site is unmatched for me.

The whole thing is exciting as I’ve been wanting to use something like this for a long time, but it seems to me to be in its infancy and like it isn’t polished just yet, so there are some rough edges to smooth off, but it is what I’m using to author and maintain this web site, and what I’ll work with moving forward for the web work that I do. There just isn’t a great deal of learning out there right now specific to FSE unfortunately.


Posted

in

by

Tags: