It was announced as a discussion panel about the present and future of WordPress with Full Site Editing.
The panelists, highly involved in this new feature, discussed many topics about FSE and how it is going to be a new revolution in the WordPress ecosystem.
The Panelist were Danielle Zarcaro, Grzegorz Ziółkowski, Koen Van den Wijngaert and Milana Cap
Jose Ramon Padron and Lesley Molecke moderated the discussion.
Torque Magazine did an outstanding job live tweeting.
The transcript and table of contents
- Introduction of the topic and the panelists
- What is full site editing and where did it come from?
- What problem does Full-Site Editing solve?
- What happens to websites that are live (in production) when WordPress 5.8 is released?
- What does Full Site Editing change for the various WordPress stakeholders
- Why will Full-Site Editing be in Core and not a plugin?
- What will be the role of existing page builders?
- What is going to happen with the rest of the open-source solutions like Joomla, Drupal?
José Ramón Padron: Hello, Lesley.
Lesley Molecke: Hey, Moncho.
José Ramón Padron: I’m laughing, because this is the moment my neighbor started to do this at home. I don’t know. I hope it doesn’t sound through the microphone, but I’m hearing a hammer quite hard on that building. I hope it’s not-
Lesley Molecke: I can’t hear anything, but listen, I’m ready for this next session. I can’t believe that we’re already here. It’s already the final session of the day, and it’s going to be a good one.
Introduction of the topic and the panelists
José Ramón Padron: Yes, it’s true. It’s going to be a good one, because we have a lot of good people talking about a quite good and hot topic inside the WordPress community. One of the things we are going to have, really near in, I don’t know, in 5.8, in the next version of WordPress, full site editing?
Lesley Molecke: Yes. We would like to welcome our panelists. This is a panel presentation, so it should be a good conversation with a number of experts speaking. So they will join us here on stage in just a moment. Hello, hello. Hi, everybody.
Grzegorz Ziółkowski: Hello.
Koen Van den Wijngaert: Hello, there.
Lesley Molecke: Will you please introduce yourselves?
Milana Cap: Which order?
Lesley Molecke: As you wish.
José Ramón Padron: So let’s start with Milana, just for talking.
Milana Cap: Because I’m the loudest. Well, you said expert. I’m here just for the cookies and to bribe contributors to come to documentation. Also, I’m here as documentation team co-rep. And I’m the docs focus lead for a new release, 5.8. I should be knowing what’s happening, hopefully soon. I’m Milana from Serbia.
Lesley Molecke: How about you, Danielle?
José Ramón Padron: Thank you so much.
Danielle Zarcaro: Sure. I’m having an issue too. I don’t know whether he’s blowing leaves or mowing the lawn? I don’t know what’s happening.
Lesley Molecke: We can’t hear it, it’s okay.
Danielle Zarcaro: Good. I’m Danielle. I’m from the US. I am the head of paperback web development. We build custom WordPress websites and maintain them, and maintain existing websites, and all that that comes with. We just launched overnightwebsite.com. So that’s mostly what I deal with is the old and the new of WordPress. So it’s the whole range.
José Ramón Padron: Thanks, Danielle. Let’s go with Koen.
Koen Van den Wijngaert: Hey, hi, there. Is this thing on? Hey, Good evening. I’m Koen. I’m a WordCamp and meetup organizer from Belgium. I run my own company called NEOK IT, where I provide software consultancy, partly around WordPress. I’ve been working with WordPress for a few years now. I like to learn things, as well as challenge myself while doing it.
So for a while now, I’ve been casually contributing to Gutenberg, as a way of giving back and mostly getting more accustomed to the ins and outs of the project. So that’s me.
Grzegorz Ziółkowski: It looks like it’s me now. So my name is Grzegorz Ziółkowski. I live in Oleśnica, Poland, and I work at Automatic, where I spend all time contributing to the WordPress core. My main focus is Gutenberg. I was helping to merge changes from the plugin, Gutenberg plugin to the WordPress core for the upcoming WordPress 5.8 release, which won’t contain all the necessary pieces of the full site editing. However, there is a lot of new goodies coming that will be ready to use on the site.
Lesley Molecke: Excellent. So Moncho and I have come up with a bunch of questions for you. They go from really basic, and then they work up and get more and more exciting and interesting. So we’re going to start with the first one, which is actually, this is my question, because I don’t know the answer to it yet and hopefully you will educate me. What is full site editing and where did it come from?
What is full site editing and where did it come from?
Koen Van den Wijngaert: Maybe if I can start, maybe the best thing to say at first is that full site editing is not just a big monolithic heap of a big function. It’s better to think of it as a collection of a lot of features that come with Gutenberg, as part of the second phase of the Gutenberg roadmap. Maybe someone else can pitch in now, so I don’t do a monologue.
Grzegorz Ziółkowski: If you don’t take a bigger picture, so full site editing is part of the Gutenberg project, there are four phases. And we are reaching this year, the end of phase two. The first one was introducing the building blocks for editing content. Now, we will be editing a full canvas of the sites. And the next two phases are collaborative editing. So to let people collaborate when they are changing websites or writing content. And the fourth one is multilingual support.
Koen Van den Wijngaert: What everyone is waiting for, I believe. That’s going to be a big one.
What problem does Full-Site Editing solve?
José Ramón Padron: Anything else? Anything else? Because one of the things inside of Lesley’s question is, what problem does it solve? Which is, I think, very interesting. What do you think?
Milana Cap: I think that the problem it’s trying to solve is to give the user one unique workflow to edit everything. Because at this moment, you have post, you have page, and you go to block editor. Or if you are not brave enough, you’re still using classic editor and you edit your content there.
But then you want to change your logo, then you have to go to customizer. But then you have some theme options. And it depends on theme from theme, what will you edit and where? I believe the idea is to release end user from need to know everything about the theme, you just go there and you just edit.
And if you want to edit footer, and you’re on the post and you’re editing post, and then you realize the menu is not correct, you edit menu. You don’t need to know, because nobody cares is it customizer or whatever? People care to know where it is. And it’s a good thing that you can see how it looks on the front end, which I think was the initial idea for Gutenberg. But who knows? Maybe I’m wrong.
I think that’s a huge problem that will be fixed, and solved with full site editing. For us who are building websites, I know that for every website, I have to create a ton of tutorials and everything, to show clients how to use it. And this will solve all that. So we will be out of job.
Koen Van den Wijngaert: I also like to think that it brings a lot of power and more freedom and flexibility to end users of a website. Because in the traditional way of doing things, there’s a few ways one can have a WordPress website. He can have an agency, have a website built for him. Or he could be using some sort of a theme builder, or he could have installed a theme from the theme directory or maybe it’s even a custom theme.
But now end users are able to have so much more power about editing templates, and editing all sorts of aspects of their website. I think that’s really exciting to look forward to.
Danielle Zarcaro: I think it solves a couple of problems, to add to that. It takes away some of the ambiguity around how to edit each individual thing. So WordPress’s whole thing is to democratize publishing. There were areas of the websites that were just not available to edit to anyone who doesn’t know code.
So there’s the ease of use gap that came about, that you can’t edit the 404 page, you can’t edit the header or footer, unless an option is available. Is the theme using the site logo that you upload in WordPress, or you’re going to upload the image and then theme isn’t going to show it. It gets rid of those, however the theme developer decided to do it that day, and it streamlines a lot of that process to do some expected behavior to make it easier for anyone to hop into a site and edit it, and it democratizes publishing on a whole new level.
Koen Van den Wijngaert: That’s a nice way of saying it. Yes. Because right now there’s this huge fragmented world of all different ways of themes that came up with our own way of editing site features and headers and customizing things. But there’s no real standard way of doing that. So it just makes it harder to step out of that particular ecosystem, I think. I’m looking forward to the standardized way of doing theming in WordPress.
José Ramón Padron: Grzegorz, I think you had something. Yes.
Grzegorz Ziółkowski: I wanted to add some more to it. Because I think it’s important to note that it’s not only about unifying everything, but it’s also to giving the power to users to change those little bits that annoy them, like the color of the header, or the font size.
Before, you would have, or either learn CSS or learn HTML just to edit that. But now you will have tools that will allow that, and you won’t have to call your site administrator to do a simple change. So maybe you could tell that, remove the job from those people who maintain those sites, but on the other hand, they will have more time to work on expanding their offering and improving their own products or services, just to use the time.
So this is something that sounds scary, but on the other hand, it opens a lot of possibilities. Because the idea of blocks also gives you the power that you can create your own blocks that you can use in several websites, and give additional functionality out of the box for your customers.
What happens to websites that are live (in production) when WordPress 5.8 is released?
José Ramón Padron: So regarding that this is something new, something is going to happen from 5.8, as far as I know, what happens to the WordPress websites that are already live and in production? Must they be rebuilt in order to use full site editing? Or they’re going to work in the way they are?
Milana Cap: They have to be rebuilt completely. It will crash. No, it won’t.
Koen Van den Wijngaert: It will just crash when you update.
Milana Cap: No, it won’t.
Lesley Molecke:That’s big news.
Koen Van den Wijngaert: Oh, we were not supposed to say that, sorry.
Milana Cap: No, they will not be crashed, they will not have to be rebuilt completely. As you all know, WordPress always build in mind with what is already out there, not to crash anything. And in 5.8, not everything will get in. So if I’m wrong, please correct me, but I think that in 5.8, you will have to install a Gutenberg plugin to actually use full site editing. So not everything will be there, but it will be foundation for the next releases when everything else will come in.
But still, we will have some nice things coming in and nothing will break. You can go part by part and rebuilding it and adapting for a complete editing experience.
José Ramón Padron: Thanks, Milana. Anything to add ?
Koen Van den Wijngaert: Maybe Grzegorz can do it.
Grzegorz Ziółkowski: You can go.
Koen Van den Wijngaert: Okay, but you can just… Well, some of the full site editing features will be added to 5.8, I think, but Grzegorz will probably be able to say which one exactly. I’m hearing feedback.
José Ramón Padron: An echo. There is an echo.
Koen Van den Wijngaert: So it’s not some monolithic feature, like we said before, but it’s more like a collection of features and they won’t be turned off all at once by default, by just upgrading to WordPress 5.8. You do need to have a full site editing team to enable all features, but some of them will also be available for non-block based themes.
Things like the template editor blocks, the site logo, the tagline, the query blocks, posts, posts related blocks, like post title, post [inaudible 00:14:45], they will all be made available in the post editor. And as well as that, I think it was also possible to also not edit, but with add new templates to a normal theme and edit those in the template editor. It’s pretty awesome.
Grzegorz Ziółkowski: So the first step is to allow people to change, use the block-based paradigm on a single page. So think about that, about previously you would have to create a PHP file to change a single page view. And now you will be able to do that to through UI, and that will create an override that you would be able to delete later. But as a user, so it’s more like empowering people who have access to the sites, rather that’s a feature for the team designer.
So that’s one thing. And everything like that is optional, so there will be a flag to disable that. So site owners or theme authors we will say that, “I don’t want that,” and they can remove that.
The one big change is that not necessarily related to full site editing, but is somehow in the same area is the widget editor, which will be… I don’t know what’s the final decision, but it will be depending on the feedback from the testing, either an opt-in or opt-out.
So the idea would be that you will be able to use the same blogs you use in your content to use also in site, when you would previously use widgets. So that’s a nice change. If you have your own custom blocks, you would be able to put there as well, which will open those new possibilities, and also somehow unify the interface.
But as you could hear, there is a lot of new blocks coming. But it’s just addition, it’s not something that you have to use. It’s just there if you want to try them out, that will be perfect time to do that after 5.8 is out. And there is a-
Koen Van den Wijngaert: That will be released tomorrow, by the way. So if you want to test it, please do so. It’s by a lot of users that can test and provide feedback on the new update that we can improve upon those things, and decide what can be added and what should be skipped. So go install it tomorrow.
Lesley Molecke:Yes, we should acknowledge that, that everyone here is actually working really hard right now to create the new release, while also attending WordCamp Europe and being here on this panel and contributing on track too, and y’all are everywhere. Thank you, thank you, thank you for your time.
What does Full Site Editing change for the various WordPress stakeholders
My next question has to do with stakeholders. So obviously, a big change like this to WordPress has multiple stakeholder groups. It has the end users, the users of WordPress websites down the road. It has the editors of WordPress websites. It has the companies who build themes and the companies who build plugins, and the people who contribute, all of these different groups.
I’m interested in talking about the theme creators who currently primarily rely on offering block patterns with their own header and footer and sidebar management. So how does that work with full site editing?
Danielle Zarcaro: Well, it works the same way. You can offer whatever you want. I think it’s a misconception that by giving the users the ability to do what they want means that they’ll be able to do anything they want. If you are someone like me who’s creating custom sites, you can actually more easy put options and make it so that you don’t have to install a whole extra plugin to add a couple of extra options. You reserve that for the bigger projects that you’re doing.
And it’s up to the theme creators, if they’re creating a theme on a wider scale, instead of just an individual client, that’s up to them to decide how they want it to work. They just opt into stuff, they add stuff, they add their custom options, but it’s all working within the same ecosystem, and we’re all speaking the same language now instead.
So if you don’t want to make it so that your header and your footer and your sidebars are manageable in the block editor or in full site editing, then I guess you don’t have to. You can hard code whatever you want, you can do that now, you don’t have to make any options available.
But then at some point, you’re going to start to fall behind, in terms of what you’re able to do. So it’s going to work the same way, just with more possibilities. That’s how I go about looking at it.
Koen Van den Wijngaert: You’ll be able to turn off or on, or even tweak some of the configuration options just by providing a single JSON file for those things. But also, I like to think that with full site editing, a theme developer or theme designer can benefit from a more solid foundation that is standardized and optimized for things like accessibility, usability and performance.
That way more of their time and energy can be spent into building things that actually add value to their customers, all the while benefiting from the existing full site editing features and even tweaking them to their liking. So that’s a big plus, I think. So they don’t have to go and reinvent the wheel every time they build a new website.
José Ramón Padron: There is something related to the last major change we saw in WordPress, when Gutenberg appears, when Gutenberg finally was born in 5.0. And now you can see that there is a plugin that is the old editor. And at this moment, we this kind of legacy, we can call it legacy, but it’s still available there.
Why will Full-Site Editing be in Core and not a plugin?
My question is about why there are things that can sit in the core, and a different one can be set as a plugin? For example, why put the full site editing in the core when it is something that the majority of users at this moment don’t know? And we hope all of them are going to use it, but as everything that comes new in WordPress, there is always a time for getting used to it.
So what do you think is the main reason full site editing is in the core and not, for example, in a plugin and people can choose if they want it or not?
Milana Cap: I think that now that we have Gutenberg in core, and full site editing is obviously expansion of what we were using in core by now, I think it would be silly not to have it in core and have it as a plugin, when you can use… This is just a foundation to put all the blocks that you already have. So it’s not like the structure that you still don’t have, you have. There is Gutenberg and now you will just expand it to the whole website.
And there is benefit in having everything standardized, especially for people who are using themes from our repository. So when you switch theme, you have all those available, things to edit, you know where it is, and you have all the blocks available.
José Ramón Padron: Makes sense.
Milana Cap: So that’s a huge benefit. I love that theme in wordpress.org is insisting on idea that people will change themes, and they cannot lose anything. I love that idea. I think this will really help having that.
So when you have custom themes, and people have different ways of editing right now the header, the footer, or they don’t have it at all, so you’re afraid to change the theme. But with full site editing, you will have all that available.
Now, as far as not knowing how to use it goes, we didn’t know many things, how to use. And the thing that we really need right now is, here comes my pitch, documentation. So we really, really need to document everything good, because when you don’t have documentation, people don’t know how to use it and then they don’t interact with it enough. They don’t find bugs, they don’t contribute. They don’t think ideas how to expand it, and you don’t have contributors, and there is no cycle for open source. So first, we need to do a good documentation.
We did fail a bit with Gutenberg getting in, and we can still feel it. We can still feel developers who are frustrated and don’t know how to work with it and how to build on that. I’m asking everyone to come and help. While doing documentation, you will actually learn how to do it.
I’m not afraid of new things. I don’t think anyone should be afraid, especially because this is not a really new thing, like Gutenberg was a new thing. We didn’t know what it was. Now we know, full site editing is what we already know, it’s new, but expanded, so it’s easier to learn. And if we do enough work, and we are doing… people make WordPress themes are doing great job.
Just mentioning few, Anne is doing the testing, great job, and Carolina even have a website for full site editing where you can read everything. So it’s doing better, and we can learn and there are resources, so there’s no need to be afraid of it.
Koen Van den Wijngaert: And if I’m not mistaken, there’s even seven milestones added to the full site editing milestones. It’s called gradual adoption. So that it focuses solely on making sure that full site editing features are being adopted better and more gradual. And that work is being put into actually making sure that the documentation is on par, and that the dev notes are up to date, and all of that kind of thing. So that’s also important. That’s also part of the work that’s now being done after the feature freeze for the 5.8 features.
Danielle Zarcaro: I think from my perspective, as someone who’s working with it and working with people, no one’s going to use it if you make it optional. People are going to do what they’re going to do, if you let them.
I think WordPress itself has never, it’s been very transparent about where it’s going. We’ve all been able to use Gutenberg for years now. We’ve been able to install the plugin, and then we’ve been able to use the block editor in core for years now. So it’s like we’ve had this getting used to period.
So we’re just going in the direction that we said we’d go in, and people can still find ways to go backwards. They can still install the classic plugin for sites that need it, they can install the classic plugin for certain things. They cannot enable the block editor for custom post types. There’s all kinds of stuff that you can do to counteract some of that.
But like I referenced before, and I’ve talked a lot about this in the past, at some point, you have to embrace the tool that you’re using. So you’re either going to embrace the fact that we’re all working towards the same goal, or you’re working against it and basically forking your own version and working on your own, which is fine. But then you can’t offer the latest stuff.
I think it’s up to you as a developer to, on some level, work with things, and meet WordPress where it is. You have to give up. WordPress is open source. You have to allow yourself to go with the tide a little bit.
And when you have new users who come into WordPress, who are installing things, they’re not going to know that there was an old WordPress. They’re not going to know that, oh, I have to install this other plugin to enable all of these awesome features. You have to think forward. So you have to allow these new users to start installing it, and use all the cool latest stuff.
If someone wants to go backwards for a bit, then they can put the work in to do that.
Grzegorz Ziółkowski: It’s also worth mentioning that the full site editing, it’s soon to be included in the core, it’s always something that we wanted to have. It’s not something that came, because there was the 5.0 release and the block editor. It’s the other way around.
So we took the smallest step possible to enable people to start using this block paradigm, start learning UI. We got a lot of feedback. And if you look at the iterations that worked, how the editor looked two and a half years ago and how it looks now, it’s a completely different product.
And also the way, how we people started thinking about building content with blocks is different. It’s not longer, building small custom blocks, but rather combining a lot of existing blocks into block patterns, into having UIs, having ways to change a big portion of the page with solutions. Like now it’s coming to the query block that allows you to switch the list of blog posts will be displayed on the page.
So we are constantly trying to make it easier for users to provide the infrastructure, also for plugin authors, for theme authors, so they can build upon that, and have the unified experience. So people, once they learn how to write a post, they will know how to change the template of the page, because it’s exactly the same paradigm.
It’s even in the same UI interface. You just go from one page to another, without the page reload. Everything can happen, you can go back, you can revisit how it looks when you compose everything together. It’s no longer you need to go to the preview of the page and see another tab to see, oh, it looks good, but now something broke outside of the post content. I need to go find customizers and go to this template, or call the theme author on the support and change that for me.
So this is a huge project, and has so many layers on top of that. We want to bring as much as possible, I would say, what makes sense to most of the users, but not all of them. Because there is always room for extenders to build their own solutions on top of that, and give this unique perspective and look and feel for the customers.
What will be the role of existing page builders?
Lesley Molecke: I feel like we’re tiptoeing closer and closer to this question. I’m just going to ask it, just get it out there on the table. What do you all feel is the big role for the online page builders, the Divi, the Elementor, these big guys, taking into account that we’re moving into full site editing, block patterns, all of these things that are being built into WordPress core? What is the role of these page builders that so many of us use?
Danielle Zarcaro: I think that’s up to them. I think ultimately, they were there to push the envelope. They were there to bring us to where we currently are. I think without them, we might not have had this extra push. Maybe it would have taken a few more years to put all this into core. These builders saw this hole and filled it.
And ultimately, they’re going to have a different UI anyway. So they’re going to do have their fan base, they’re going to have their whatever preference to editing things, maybe certain things are dragging and dropping. Whatever they make available, they’re going to extend WordPress. So that’s up to them to decide how they’re going to go about it.
So they’re all already currently working with the block editor, all the major ones anyway are. If they’re concerned at all about future proofing themselves, they’ve already looked into how to integrate themselves with the block editor. I think it’s only going to enhance everything to see how they go about integrating themselves into the new ecosystem.
I really love, as a developer, I love the way Oxygen goes about it, where you can build stuff, and then go and edit it in Gutenberg. So that’s a really cool take on it. And so it’s just a new way to innovate, and they’re going to have their place.
I think it’s cool that we now have these established things. We have these people to look to, to see where are the new holes in WordPress? Where can we go from here? And they’re going to continue to just push the envelope. I love the diversity that’s out there.
When you talk about builders, there’s at least four that come to mind and that’s awesome. And I hope that it stays that way and grows. And that’s only going to help us. And so hopefully, it’ll take away some of that, Divi does this way and Elementor does this way. So some things are going to hopefully become uniform, and then they’ll branch out in other ways.
Koen Van den Wijngaert: Exactly. Because now, there’s a few big ones indeed, and they all seem to have their own ecosystem surrounding them, which is okay, because as you said, they all implement and provide their own stream of users to the WordPress platform. So it’s definitely interesting to look at, and observe how they will interact with WordPress and Gutenberg.
I know most of them already have some sort of a way to either include a new template view or something as a block, or even toggle between Gutenberg and their own editor. But the thing I’m actually quite looking forward to is whether or not they will start using the new default way of doing things. So that they can actually merit from how it is now going to be supposed to be done, and add on top of that their own set of features and new value-adding stuff.
Like the cadence theme, for example, is doing. In my eyes, it’s quite a nice way of implementing Gutenberg the right way. I’m very interested to see how they will be going to implement full site editing things in the near future, because now it’s all in the customizer, of course. So, interesting.
What is going to happen with the rest of the open-source solutions like Joomla, Drupal?
José Ramón Padron: We were talking about how full site editing can affect the own WordPress ecosystem, talking about for example, what happens with the builders, builders like Divi, Elementor, et cetera. But what do you think, taking account you are developers, designers, you are on the technical side, contributors, what do you think is going to happen with the rest of the open source solutions like Joomla, Drupal? How do you think it’s going to affect? So it’s going to make WordPress better than the rest, it’s going to be a real advantage in front of the rest, like Wix, like the other ones, not only in the open source reality, but outside WordPress? What do you think is going to happen with full site editing?
Milana Cap: They will all take Gutenberg. Drupal already do it.
Koen Van den Wijngaert: But Drupal also has a [crosstalk 00:37:15]. But there’s not like this CMS is better than the other one. They all serve different purposes. And it’s like using the right tool for the right job. And having more competition in the game is pretty good actually.
I think the biggest reason that we, as WordPress, have the biggest market share to date in the CMS market is because of the low threshold to start building websites. And that’s partly thanks to all of those theme builders. I think it’s important to reach out and make sure that we all keep using WordPress and not just fork off their own version of WordPress, because it’s open source, they can do that.
So if we all collaborate, we can build pretty nice things, I think.
Milana Cap: I think we already saw this many times in history, but let’s just take a look at Internet Explorer 6. It was so bad that we got this good Chrome and Firefox. And it was so difficult to create posts for some people in WordPress, that we got page builders. So this is happening. There is always this kind of competition between WordPress and Joomla and Drupal.
But the truth is, they all have their share. Ours is a little bigger than theirs, but they will continue to exist, and I hope they will push, they will invent something new. And then we will be jealous, and we will do something better, because that’s how it works. Human mind compares. So that’s what we do.
I’m proud that 12 years ago I have selected WordPress and now it’s 40%. I think I’m smart, because I did that. But I don’t like just one way of doing things. I like things messing up. I like people inventing new things. That makes us all better and everything makes better.
I’m really looking forward to see what other CMSs will do, but also what will page builders do. I have never used page builder, as someone who builds website and some of you uses website. I cannot say anything.
But I’m seeing in our WordPress Serbia Facebook group, I’m seeing people asking questions about it. I know what they are doing and how, and I really hope to see they invent something insane, so we will have to push Gutenberg again and just pushing forward.
Koen Van den Wijngaert: Even better.
Danielle Zarcaro: I think it’s going to blur the line a little bit. Because I just recently had to go into a Wix site and it is no longer Wix or Weebly. It is Wix or Webflow. Webflow popped up as an in between to Weebly and the GoDaddy builder and WordPress.
I think it blurs the line a little bit, where you can now visually edit things and you can now edit those parts, like I said, the 404. All these other things, you can just do now. And so I think it blurs the line and WordPress can now fit into more categories as well.
So maybe it’s not a Squarespace, which is a template machine that you stick a bunch of stuff in and it’s easy, but it does open it up to a whole nother market. Instead of just, oh, you got to have somebody on your side, it now opens the door for more people. And then now they’re ready to grow, and now they come to you and are familiar with WordPress.
So there’s the three or four other markets that’ll pop up as well. So it blurs a little bit and makes it a little more accessible.
Grzegorz Ziółkowski: There’s also one thing that I’m looking forward to, is the blog patterns directory, which should enable a quicker creation of websites, instead of going, changing everything yourself. If you don’t have, like me, skills for designing, you just pick something that someone crafted very carefully. And maybe pay some fee for that and have unique experience for all the use cases you have.
It’s no longer you need to use one theme, and hope that it has all the solutions you need. Instead, you can combine from different sources and build the best experience you need. So that’s one thing.
One thing that I’m looking forward to is how I’m seeing the growth of headless. It’s getting a lot of attention at the conferences in the WordPress community. And that interaction with full site editing, I’m looking forward how that will evolve. Because at the moment, if you want to use headless solutions you need to build from scratch the front end side.
However, if you combine that with what Gutenberg can produce and reach that, that will open a new set of possibilities. And that will bring big companies looking at WordPress, because now they will be able to build completely custom solutions, and also use whatever WordPress provides in its core, rather treating it as a source of the content only.
José Ramón Padron: I’m glad to read that question.
Lesley Molecke: Koen, you have one final thing to add, before we sign off?
Koen Van den Wijngaert: I was going to say that one obstacle might be that a lot of back end developers have mostly skills in writing PHP and stuff. But most of the new features, you really do benefit more if you have a JavaScript back end. I think we should also focus on helping those developers transition into more and more adopting JavaScript and active development to develop even better new solutions.
Milana Cap: And documentation.
Koen Van den Wijngaert: Most importantly, of course.
Lesley Molecke: Yes. Well, thank you, thank you, thank you all for this really interesting conversation. I now know more about full site editing than I do before, thanks to you. But also, I think our audience does as well, which is fantastic.
And again, thank you for taking the time to join us, even though you’re also so, so busy working on the new release, and working on this massive change to WordPress. We’re really grateful to you and your time. Enjoy the rest of the conference. We will see you later and thank you.
Will you be heading over to the Q&A room to talk with the audience? Does that sound like a familiar thing to you? All right.
Milana Cap: We can, if there are questions.
José Ramón Padron: There will be.
Lesley Molecke: People can also make meetings with you and see you in other rooms and things.
José Ramón Padron: There will be more content related full site editing during WordCamp Europe, in each day, I think, or also in the number two track. So this is not the last time we are going to talk about full site editing.
Another thing is to say thank you for accepting our invitation, more or less in the last minute. Thank you. Thank you so much.
Lesley Molecke:Thank you all.
Milana Cap: Thank you, bye.
Grzegorz Ziółkowski: Thank you.
Koen Van den Wijngaert: Thank you. Very nice to being here.
José Ramón Padron: See you around. Ta-ta.
