Core Editor Improvement: Choose your Style

These “CoreCore Core is the set of software required to run WordPress. The Core Development Team builds WordPress. Editor Improvement…” posts (labeled with the #core-editor-improvement tagtag A directory in Subversion. WordPress uses tags to store a single snapshot of a version (3.6, 3.6.1, etc.), the common convention of tags in version control systems. (Not to be confused with post tags.)) are a series dedicated to highlighting various new features, improvements, and more from Core Editor related projects. 

With Gutenberg 12.5 and the soon to be released GutenbergGutenberg The Gutenberg project is the new Editor Interface for WordPress. The editor improves the process and experience of creating new content, making writing rich content much simpler. It uses ‘blocks’ to add richness rather than shortcodes, custom HTML etc. https://wordpress.org/gutenberg/ 12.8, a blockBlock Block is the abstract term used to describe units of markup that, composed together, form the content or layout of a webpage using the WordPress editor. The idea combines concepts of what in the past may have achieved with shortcodes, custom HTML, and embed discovery into a single consistent API and user experience. theme author can now bundle multiple sets of Styles with their theme, allowing anyone using the theme to quickly switch between them as shortcuts for customization. These different Style presets can change both settings available, like turning on/off font weight, and style options, like the default color palette. For a practical example of what this looks like, check out the quick demo below showing off how a theme could offer both light and dark Style presets:

You can experience this for yourself locally by using the Twenty Twenty Two theme, creating a new styles folder in the root of the twentytwentytwo theme folder, and dropping this gist in there. 

This Styles feature gets even more exciting when it’s paired with new enhancements like the fonts API in theme.json coming to Gutenberg 12.8. That opens the door for a wide range of styles per theme — look for more and more themes to leverage this in the coming months. The following video shows off some new creative possibilities that are opened up by these new features in combination: 

If you’re a block theme author looking to take advantage of this new feature, dig into the documentation now to learn how to create different style presets and align with the necessary theme structure. 

Thank you to @kjellr for the demos and help writing this post. 

#block-themes, #core-editor, #full-site-editing