Wordpress Playground Interview

Interview With Adam Zieliński the WordPress Playground Architect

Roger Montti @ searchenginejournal.com • 1 year ago

Roger Montti interviewed Adam Zieliński, the WordPress Playground Architect at Automattic. This was my question, which got answered:

“Site builders often have one or more “starter sites”, which seem to squarely line up with blueprints, though they usually include premium themes and plugins. Drupal has “Distributions,” which are basically pre-configured starter sites often with a niche focus.

Imagine a pre-configured install of core, a theme, a membership plugin, and payment setup (waiting for gateway API keys). If you want a membership site then just install this and start adding content. Or a pre-configured help desk system and so on.

So, I’m wondering if the vision is that Blueprints will provide something similar?”

Bricks Vs Site Editor

Thoughts About: Live Page Building with Kevin Geary and Brian Coords

Kevin Geary and Brian Coords @ youtube.com  • 1 year ago

Brian Coords was using the Gutenberg Site Editor and Kevin Geary was using Bricks and ACSS. They were each to have 45-50 minutes to recreate a pre-selected part of the Ghost.org home page.

Brian began by introducing a custom block theme that he prepared for this stream. It was his starter theme where he added colors and maybe some spacing and other presets into theme.json.

I was surprised as I imagined that people would begin by picking a theme, but what we saw is that a custom theme is something a pro site builder might do. This was an “ah ha” moment that explains why pros using the Site Editor don’t understand the frustration others express … because they are working with the Site Builder as a theme developer or power user and using a totally different workflow.

Kevin showed how fast you can go with Bricks together with ACSS. He also talked about how a workflow using classes and CSS variables makes it easier to style consistently and to make changes down the road.

I think that people who were unfamiliar with Bricks and ACSS were just as surprised about this workflow as people who saw building with a custom block theme there were surprised by that approach to the Site Builder. So, there was an element of “what you are used to.” All in all, it was a very interesting session that was hosted by Mark Szymanski and Matt Eastwood.