Block Themes, Classic Themes, Hybrid Themes, Universal Themes. WHAT IS A WORDPRESS THEME?!?!

 

It used to be WordPress just had themes, but now there are all sorts of types of themes. What are the differences between block, classic, hybrid, and universal themes? AND WHAT IS FULL SITE EDITING?!?! I’ll do my very best to make it clear, I promise.

Hey folks, welcome to another HeroPress Tip of the Week! This week we’re going to talk about theme types; block themes, classic themes, hybrid themes, full site editing, what is a theme? Get ready for one of the longest tips of the week we’ve done yet, because there’s a lot to talk about in this one. Full disclosure, I want to start off by saying that I learned a lot in the making of this video from this post by Justin Tadlock on the Tavern, where he talks about the exact same question. But the reason that I’m making this video and not simply telling you to go read this article is that this is just over a year old, and there are quite a few things that have changed since then. At the time of its writing, I agreed 100% Is Justin as a clever man. And he knows exactly what he’s talking about. But the rate of change in Gutenberg is approximately the same speed as a comet screaming through space and what was true then is not now and what is true now will not be in a year.

So let’s take a look at what has changed from this. And we’re going to start with the classic and hybrid themes. And Justin makes the point that there is no need to differentiate the two. At the time, they were so similar that it was that it just wasn’t really a difference. And his point is that we do not separate the theme types, because we’ve never done so when themes adopt new features. When we got the nav menu system, we didn’t call it a new theme, or anything like that. So I disagree. Now, we’re going to look at classic themes. And I’m gonna classify classic theme is one that uses traditional style PHP template files, and does not have any basic block styles and HTML built in. There’s a screenshot here my own blog, and I using it because I built this theme. And as far as I know, I’m the only one in the whole world using it. And I have done nothing to make it Gutenberg compatible. I’ll use the classic editor, there are no blocks anywhere in this theme. Mostly because I’m too lazy to put them in there. I don’t blog on them often enough. And when I do the classic editor is exactly what I need. If I ever decide I need the block editor, I will probably just switch to a different theme rather than convert this one. But there’s nothing in here that is block editor related. It’s just a plain old theme. And there are probably hundreds of these themes still on wordpress.org or for sale or on the Internet, because it’s a fair amount of work these days to convert. And a lot of people would just would rather abandon the old theme than convert it. And that’s fair enough. So that’s a classic theme. It’s not Gutenberg in any way.

But then there’s hybrid. And these are the two that that he said were basically the same. Hybrid also uses traditional style template files. And as an old fashion developer, I appreciate that actually, because I like hacking php. However, a hybrid theme is going to lean heavily on blocks in the WordPress editor. Our screenshot here is the hero press network. And that was built with the Kadence theme. And if you’ve ever used Kadence, you know that it is nothing like using a classic theme like mine. You build your site in Gutenberg, you build your posts in it, you build your sidebar, you you build just about everything in Gutenberg. And it’s great, it’s wonderful. But it still has those underlying plain old PHP template files that we used 10 years ago. They’re well written, they’re modernized, but there’s still old fashioned php. So we’ve done classic, we’ve done hybrid. Now let’s look at full site editing. And this is where things really start to change uses very few template files. And those are nothing like the old PHP template files, template file template files that it does use use block code. And so it’s like if you were in the Gutenberg editor and switch to text mode and saw all that block code. That’s just what’s in the template files. It also removes many classic tools, for example, the customizer, let me show you what I mean. Here’s TwentyTwentyTwo Right now I’m sorry, this is the .org page for tour. I have my TwentyTwentyTwo pulled up here. This is TwentyTwentyTwo. And there is no customizer link. And if you go into the admin area, there is no widgets link, and there’s no navigation link. None of that stuff is there. Everything is done right here. So you click Edit Site, and be able to edit the title and the page title and the nav and the footer, and all of it right here. So that’s a full site, full site editing blog theme. But then there’s one more that I think is interesting. And they’re very rare. This is called the universal theme. He had replaces some of the classic tools that the full set editor took out. And let me show you what I mean here. So now we’re looking at a theme called Block bass. And it also is a full site editing theme, you can click right here to Edit Site. Let me show you what that looks like. We click it, and there’s my header. There’s my nav. There’s my page title, my content area, all that stuff. But also we have back the customizer. Now, I say it replaces some of the things because you’ll note that here in the customizer, we can’t edit menus. There’s actually very, very few options. If you’re accustomed to something like Katyn Kadence. This is going to seem very, very sparse. Furthermore, if we lost by theme, Yep, there we go. In the admin area, there’s the customizer under appearance, but we still don’t have the navs and we still don’t have widgets.

So universal themes are kind of a hybrid between full site editing and going backwards a little bit. But one of the things that I think is most exciting is that it has the potential for Child Themes. There’s a great post here from theme shaper, where they talk about being able to basically edit your theme, you install the parent, and you edit it to however you want, you create new colors, default colors, you set up a bunch of settings, you make templates, all that kind of stuff. But then at the end, you can export and it becomes a child theme. And that theme, takes over all the templates that you created, and all the color settings that you created. And all of that. I don’t know of a way to do this with full site editing yet. So being able to do it. This one is specifically for block base, which is the universal one that I was just showing you. This is brilliant. This is one of the things that I have been wary of with full site editing and even Gutenberg in general, the ability to make child themes that have built in templates and things like that, because that’s really important when it comes to child themes. And so this ability to do this with universal themes is really, really great. So let’s go back to the beginning and review. We have classic themes, basically the old way. And the real differentiator between classic and something like full site editing is the reliance on traditional style template files. Hybrid still uses those traditional style template files, but leans heavily on blocks in the WordPress editor. And again, if you’ve used a modern theme like Kadence and compare it to something like 2010 The experience is vastly different. You can’t really say that they’re, they’re the same anymore. Then there’s full site editing, which changes everything. And it’s a completely different experience building a website with full site editing and universal, which gives us full site editing but backs up a little bit and gives us things like the customizer and the potential for Child Themes and things likethat. So the last thing I’m gonna say is go back and read this article from Justin. It’s, it’s great. But remember that some things have changed and take that into account. I hope you find this useful.