The Kadence team did a live stream a couple of days ago. They discussed the new Advanced Header / Navigation Blocks and went over some of the features that weren’t demoed in the earlier walk-through. Ben also shared how he saw FSE going forward and he announced several upcoming new features for Kadence. These include options for gradient text, more templates, an Advanced Table block, and a new A/B Testing plugin. Looks like some good stuff coming.

GutenKit is a new block collection from Wpmet. It has a ton of features and was created from the start to work in the Site Editor. This video includes a GutenKit overview and a walk-through using the Pro version to create Custom Post Type templates. The strengths and areas needing improvement are shown and discussed.

A prototype was released showing how to create Custom Post Types and custom fields using the block editor and then display them using the Site Editor. While the project is still new, it demonstrates the thinking and possible direction for Gutenberg. Very cool. In this video we take a look at how this is currently working. It may be some time before this makes it into a WordPress core release, if it every does.

Dynamic Shortcodes is a powerful option for displaying dynamic data. This tutorial shows creating a single template for a Custom Post Type created with Meta Box. A number of different custom field types are displayed. This is a lightweight solution to displaying dynamic data using the Site Editor

Mike McAlister shares about the launch of the Pro version of the Ollie theme and about developing a product for the site editor.

Thinking of trying out the Site Editor? Mike Hindle tried an experiment and used the Twenty Twenty-Four theme for a simple business site. He shares the pain points he encountered and how he addressed them.

If you want to get up to speed on Gutenberg and the Site Editor, Brian Gardner has a 5 part video series that nicely explains: how to install Google fonts, adding a site icon, understanding list view, WordPress patterns, and getting started with global styles.

This was interesting. Ben Ritner from Kadence used Kadence Theme and Kadence Blocks to create the home page of the Rolling Stone website. Justin Tadlock used Gutenberg for the challenge. They had 30 minutes to see how far they could get. It seemed like Ben was going a little faster and smoother. I was surprised that Justin didn’t work in the Site Editor, but in a page. He brought his own custom theme.

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.