From the course: First Look: WordPress Full-Site Editing

The language of full-site editing - WordPress Tutorial

From the course: First Look: WordPress Full-Site Editing

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The language of full-site editing

- [Instructor] With the evolution of the block-based editor the lexicon of WordPress is evolving too. There's an official glossary, but I want to highlight some core terms and concepts to get you started. And I think the easiest way to do that is to show you a local WordPress installation I have, and point out the moving parts. First there's Blocks, blocks are at the heart of full site editing. If you've already worked with Gutenberg or the block editor you're familiar with the concept of blocks. Instead of creating content with freeform text, inserted media, embeds, or shortcodes, et cetera content is created in a unit of flux. There are a number of core blocks included in WordPress but you can create custom blocks too. There are also plugins out there that introduce them owned blocks. Next, there's the block inserter library. That's the interface you use to select available blocks. You can trigger the block inserter by clicking this plus icon from within the content editor or there's this plus sign in the top toolbar you can use to open up the block library. Now let's take a look at block patterns. Patterns are predefined groupings or layouts of blocks that can be inserted as starter content and then changed by the user. For example, I'll insert this two buttons pattern. It's made up of two individual blocks that I can customize or edit to my liking. Now note that any changes I make to this pattern they're only saved for the single instance. If I were to re-insert this pattern again, it would go back to its default state. But what if you wanted to configure a single block or block pattern and save those customizations so that every time you use it it's already configured to your liking? Well, there's a way to do that and that's called reusable blocks. From the block pattern, I can click this more options and say, Add to Reusable Blocks and I'll give it a name of Two Buttons Dark. So now if I go back and insert, I didn't say Two Buttons Dark, there it is and I can insert it. And you can see that that pattern has the changes that I made previously. So reusable blocks can be edited globally while blocks or patterns are edited on an individual basis. Next, I want to introduce you to block-based themes. These themes are built in a way that allows full site editing to work. At the time of this recording, full site editing is not available in WordPress core. So if you want to test it you'll need the latest version of the Gutenberg plugin installed as well as a block-based theme. I'm using the T1 or 2021 blocks theme. At some point, this theme will be available in the WordPress theme repository, but for now if you'd like to experiment with it, you can download it directly from GitHub. At the core of a block-based theme are block templates and block template parts. To date block-based theme templates are HTML files of block markup that map the templates based on the WordPress template hierarchy. More on that later. The last thing I want to introduce you to in this lesson is global styles. If you're using a full site editing theme, you can access the global styles panel from within the site editor. As the name suggests global styles enable you to set site-wide defaults from within the editor. As the name suggest, global styles enable you to set site-wide defaults for things like typography, font size, colors, et cetera. You can also set site-wide defaults by Block. Now you could still customize the elements of a block on an individual poster page, but global styles is a way to apply consistent styling as specific elements across the site. As a quick recap, in this lesson I've introduced you to the most common terms you'll hear when talking about full site editing. There's blocks, block inserter library, block patterns, block-based themes, templates in template parts, and global styles. Now that you've got the lingo, let's take a more in-depth look at blocks.

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