At the outset, let me say this: I love the block editor. I am possibly one of the few people to unequivocally say this. I came back to WordPress after a few years in the static site generator world (Jekyll, Hugo etc.) because the Gutenberg editor in WordPress made it easy for me to layout posts (and pages) exactly the the way I wanted. No more futzing around custom styles on random pages, keeping track of which page had which css and so on.
I typically start a post in a text editor (these days Ulysses, BBEdit before), flesh out some bits and leave the rest as an outline. I then transfer this over to WordPress and finish the writing and editing. That’s how much I like the block editor.
So I was extremely eager to try out the new full site editor and themes that come along with it. It seemed like a perfect Sunday afternoon project.
So, pouring myself a nice beer, I sat down and started playing around with the Twenty Two theme. It was initially very confusing to navigate and figure out where all the knobs and buttons were, but I chalked that down to me not being familiar with the changes. But ten minutes in, I still hadn’t figured out how to make a simple change — have all my posts centred on the page, but keeping the text aligned to the left. To make matters worse, the default post listing template only showed excerpts and not full posts, something I absolutely do not like. I kept flailing and flailing. Finding help on the topic was next to impossible because almost all WordPress topics everywhere on the web is SEO’d to hell.
After forty-five minutes, I gave up and reverted my theme.
I really, really want to like the new full site editing features, but at the moment it is a disaster. WordPress have a real challenge on hand to make it easier to work with. I am rooting for them as I believe the feature will help a lot of people design better websites and maintain them without much external help.