Like I said before, this site is intended as a living space to test new techniques, WordPress themes, and that sort of thing. I’m still experimenting, but so far the new WordPress 2024 theme feels nearly identical to 2023. Historically, WordPress themes tend to be a focused demonstration of a new tool or element, but when 2023 came out, it was all about the deep (but not total) integration of the new site editor. The big change in 2024 seems to be that we have entirely done away with the old theme editor and are now relying on the new block-based theme editor. This is going to cause some upheaval with certain plugins that relied on the old theme editor, but overall, I feel like this was a good move. It makes sense that WP took that half-measure last year to give developers a year to update their plugins before this switch became total.
There are a few new challenges that come with this update. One I’m working to resolve right now, is that certain parts of pages (eg: featured image) are born “locked”. I’ve been looking around for a while, and can’t figure out how to unlock these parts. These parts are such an important part of the page’s look/feel, you’d think that it would be easier to change, but WordPress seems to have cemented them in.(1)
As with the 2023 WordPress theme, there are some other aspects that are hard to customize. Color, for example, only has a handful of presets—and these aren’t all that bad but they are limited and tied to other presets. You can change a setting here and there, but it’s way too easy to accidentally hit a preset button and wipe all that customization progress out. So if you’re making this for a client, it would be very easy for them to get curious and wipe out the entire look/feel of their site without any way to get it back. The solution I’ve found is to rewrite the script in the theme folder that supplies those presets, creating my own preset—though I haven’t been so bold as to delete the pre-installed ones.
Another weird issue: I set up the header on my home page to have a cover at the top. This allows me to easily float my logo over a background without having to fuss too much. That’s a lie. My site wasn’t sitting properly on mobile and scrolled left—it was super annoying so I inspected the site. There’s a weird quirk in the 2024 theme’s CSS that added calculated margins to the left and right of the cover and caused the contents of the cover to extend off the right edge. You can’t set the left and right margins in the WP interface, so I had to figure out how to do it in the CSS. There’s a feature that came out with the WP 2023 update that allows you to add a bit of CSS anywhere (like the old system did) through the styles menu. I targeted the exact selectors that WP was using to create the bad margins and overwriting them like this:
.has-global-padding > .alignfull {
margin-right: calc(var(--wp--style--root--padding-right) * -1);
margin-left: calc(var(--wp--style--root--padding-left) * -1);
}
If I were making this for a client, I’d avoid using that menu altogether and make a child theme sheet. I’ll still probably do that, but first I have to see if this rule messes anything else up.
- Okay, I found it. Turns out that—even though they appear to be part of the standard page—there are some parts you have to edit in the template editor.