For the past year or so, I have been building themes for some clients. They are usually built using the full site editor, native to WordPress. Nothing fancy but something I am enjoying is working with basics and minimal use of anything too customised

Some freelancers who I sometimes meet at our local meetup often ask how to start with FSE. I generally share some of my own starting points, some tips and some guides on how to go about it. I thought it be helpful to share some of these as links.

I started my journey creating a FSE theme thanks to this really cool plugin called Create Block Theme. I usually install it on my Studio App. That is how I run WordPress on my local computer. Then, I would start a new theme from scratch!

I also have some handy plugins. I use them for creating some blocks or doing some things quickly.

Some of these handy plugins I use are

• Create Block Theme – obviously.
• Gutenberg – helps with a lot of blocks or features which might not be in core
• Jetpack – it ships with some nifty blocks – I think in all 49 of them
• View Transitions – helps your page load really smoothly thanks to caching
• Icon Block – Nice plugin to use custom SVG files to use as icons on the website.

Now that I have some experience with theme building, I prefer to use a clone of Twenty Twenty Four. I then use it with Create Block Theme. I would like to graduate to Twenty TwentyFive as a base theme – or maybe Twenty Six directly!

I used this workflow by Anders Norén’s. It helped me a lot to customise my own workflow for a new theme.

Type Scale Generator by Baseline is a nifty tool to create type scale generator for consistent typography.

Learning

I do learn a lot about Full Site Editor using a couple of resources. There is Gutenberg Times and also FullSiteEditing.com

I also learned a lot from Jamie Marsland and his video tutorials. He is really good at using core blocks on WordPress and creating beautiful layouts.

Chase down a win

The best way to go about it is to pick a project and build something. It allows the brain to chase a target down. The end goal being, to ship something rather than learning something in theory.

It’s like playing a sport, like chess or cricket. You can learn and practice all you want but the best learning happens while chasing down a win!