Disable customizer and widgets from FSE #26594
Conversation
youknowriad
added
[Feature] Full Site Editing
[Type] Experimental
youknowriad
requested review from
spacedmonkey and
TimothyBJacobs
as code owners
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Size Change: 0 B Total Size: 1.21 MB ℹ️ View Unchanged
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The "beta" pill might be useful in other areas of FSE – some of the blocks, for example. That said, a unique style might be more appropriate. Probably doesn't have to block this PR though, it will take a little design work to mock up all the different locations it might appear. |
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I think it would be a bad move to hide them now without clearly communicating to the WordPress community what the future of widgets and the customizer is. Hiding them is going to lead to more questions from worried users and developer.
The only thing that can alleviate that and clear out some confusion is information. |
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Happy to share what we discussed on slack here, the idea here is that since FSE themes don't have widget areas, the widgets screen is useless. For the customizer, it's a duplicate of the Site Editor screen (similar capabilities), so we need to make sure the Site Editor fills the gaps left by the Customizer. Global styles and Site blocks address most of the site options required for FSE themes and making the switch (hiding the customizer) will allow us to discover gaps we're missing. |
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I like the idea of disabling the customizer and widget screens to speed up the process of discovering what's really missing in the current implementation of the site editor. The sooner we have all the missing features listed and converted into action items, the better we can plan how the transition could look like. |
youknowriad
requested review from
adamziel,
ajitbohra,
draganescu,
ellatrix,
kevin940726,
nerrad,
noisysocks,
ntwb,
Soean,
talldan and
tellthemachines
as code owners
Co-authored-by: Ari Stathopoulos <aristath@gmail.com>
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I would keep in mind that any proposals for bridging FSE with existing themes, and providing migration paths do not work with this unless you force theme developers to completely abandon customizer controls and widgets all at once. There is no way to migrate functionality piece by piece for theme authors. This is particularly problematic for themes that are currently heavily widget based. If I activate an FSE theme I lose access to my widgets and can no longer reference them to migrate to block based widgets in an FSE template. I'd suggest a new theme support named |
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I have three widget-based themes, disabling the widgets will make my themes absolute. And I don't see any clear path to migrate from widgets to Blocks. The only option I have right now is to create a block plugin and tell my users to stop using the widgets and install block plugin. If this is the case, I'm sure pretty other developers will be put off by the lack of communication & no clear migration path. |
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Hybrid themes (some templates are regular php templates with widgets... and others are block-based templates) is something that is yet to be worked on. If we find a decent way to make this kind of theme possible, it's clear that they would need access to widgets and customizer pages. At the moment though, FSE themes are exclusive, and having these screens there is confusing. |
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I believe the Site Editor will edit, at least in its initial versions, only block based themes. The Site Editor itself should not be visible if the theme installed is a classic theme. But when the user moves to a block based theme, the Customizer, Widgets and Navigation screens will not be useful at all, because block based themes do not use widget areas, navigation locations, nor do they benefit from the Customizer in any way. When the user moves to a classic theme they appear right back. At least this is my current understanding of this. |
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What about theme mods? Will they still work? Or will we need to create custom theme options again? |
They will work. You should have no need for them in an FSE theme, but if you do then they'll work fine. |
I was thinking on a dynamic theme for example sidebar left or right or no sidebar and so on. |
In an FSE theme there is no such thing as "sidebar". There is no "header", "footer" or anything like that. The concept of theme-options that modify the structure/layout etc of a page no longer applies. Users create their own layouts and page-structure from the editor itself. Instead of a sidebar, they add 2 columns and just set the 2nd column to whatever width they want the "sidebar" to be. Instead of widgets, they add blocks to the column they just created. That's why this change was done for FSE themes... widgets and widget-areas in an FSE theme are irrelevant concepts. An FSE theme can use options from the customizer, but with global-styles and user-built templates there really is no point to it. |
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I have dozens of sites that use widgets, sidebars and navigation with classic themes. Some sites have 40 different side bars on thousands of posts and pages.
I feel like there is a lack of transparency on FSE development for something could very well make my work for the last 5 years obsolete and as an independent developer may very well put me out of business... |
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Hi @pointydrip I understand your concerns but we're well aware of that, millions of users rely on these features and it's not our goal to prevent you folks from upgrading.
I expect these will work forever for classic themes so your work won't be lost.
While some of FSE work is targetted for 5.7, it's still early to say for sure that it will happen there or not. And even if it does, classic themes and your work is not going anywhere. Things will work for you just as they do today and you'll be able to upgrade safely. Disabling customizer and widgets is for the new FSE themes, if your theme is not an FSE them, nothing will change.
Migration is something yet to be explored, we have some ideas on the matter, but nothing implemented so far. |
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@youknowriad Thank you for your answers.
I realize that the issue of widgets areas and FSE have been raised many times and I still don't have a clear answer even after installing an FSE theme and trying Gutenberg 9.7. The main issue is that a widgetized sidebar on a site with thousands of posts/pages where you would you would want to change a widget area across hundreds of posts it is not obvious how that would work in FSE. Additionally advance content management such as the ability to use the bulk editor to apply widget areas is extremely useful to retroactively change content filters. This is the fundamental basis for using wordpress as a CMS and it does not appear to be addressed in FSE. A congratulations in order as Gutenberg and FSE are snappy and quick editors compared to 3rd party options and I would very much like to see a transition to Gutenberg for many of my clients. That being said I think a lot of anxiety that comes from developers is that it has always been a safe bet to follow the lead of wordpress core as most plugins and themes will follow suite, however Gutenberg and FSE don't seem to be to be considering the aspects of CMS that wordpress has always embraced. If they are it it is not obvious how that works or will work... |
It's very viable. a few months ago I experimented with it successfully (you can see the code here) and even though I never completed the implementation, doing so wouldn't be that difficult.
In an FSE theme you can edit the templates from the editor. So you wouldn't be adding your "sidebar" in the posts themselves but in the templates. The same template is then reused for all posts and therefore the same content for the sidebars will show for all posts - if you so choose. |
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Does anything actually break if the menu item is added back? I feel like unblocking it is easier than answering the questions that no one has the answers to:
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Builds on top of #26500
This PR cleans wp-admin a bit for FSE themes: