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.

Anne-Mieke Bovelett writes about why she moved from Elementor to using the Full Site Editor. One reason was because it was easier to make sites built with the Site Editor accessible.

I learned a new technical term today, “morange.”

On Wednesday there was a “Hallway Hangout” to discuss using the Site Editor for client sites. Here is a recap summary and the video recording. From the recap it looks like a number of pain points were identified.

Brian Coords is kind of thinking out loud in this post where he plans his next project which will use a block theme and the Site Editor.

Here is a Tavern article with a pretty full summary of the outreach meeting about the problems with the Site Editor. Fairly nuanced. The bottom line seems to be that they hope people will come to the meetings and provide feedback and not just post on social media.

Anne McCarthy again – About a week ago she posted an article on her personal blog titled Overlapping Problems, which surfaced a number of rough spots with the content editor and site editor experiences.

Yesterday she hosted a Hallway Hangout which was attended by a broad spectrum of contributors, users, agency owners, etc. One thing that is interesting about this is that the Hallway Hangout functioned in an open-ended fashion to allow people to share their frustrations and suggestions.

The Make post has a summary of topics discussed and the full discussion is available with a YouTube video at the top of the post.

There is a new font manager coming in WordPress 6.5. In this video I look at how it works and its limitations.

I was a bit surprised to see this blog post by Anne McCarthy on Gutenberg inconsistencies and missed opportunities.