WordPress 5.0 shipped with a brand new, block-based content editor named Gutenberg. It is a huge improvement for content editing, and will become even more powerful as more blocks are built in core and in plugins.
All WordPress themes work with Gutenberg. It’s simply a new interface for creating content. No changes are required to your theme to display your new block-based content.
However, there are some new features that your theme can take advantage of with minor updates. Also, the content editing experience can be improved with additional styling in the theme to ensure the backend block editor matches the frontend styling of the theme.
I’ll guide you through updating your current WordPress theme to support these new features. If you’re not a developer and need help, I recommend you use Codeable – they are fast, knowledgeable, and affordable.
Developer's Guide to Gutenberg
I walk you through the technical details and code snippets you need as a WordPress developer building a Gutenberg website.
Frontend Styles
You likely have styles for many of these items (blockquotes, horizontal rules), but Gutenberg loads its own styles. You may need additional styles and specificity to ensure consistency.
Turn on wide images
Users can now have “wide” and “full” image alignments if your theme supports it. This allows the image to expand beyond the wrapping content area. You can see an example on my About page.
To add support, simply include this in your theme’s functions.php file:
add_theme_support( 'align-wide' );
It’s up to your theme to style these alignments. See my guide to wide and full image alignment in Gutenberg.
Blockquotes
Gutenberg includes two types of blockquote blocks: a standard blockquote and “large” one. It also includes a “pull quote” blockquote which is designed to be smaller and floated in the content.
All quotes can include a citation, using the <cite> element.
Here’s some base styling I use for these elements (using SASS):
Horizontal Rules
There’s a horizontal rule with its own class ( hr.wp-block-separator), so you should make that match your theme’s standard horizontal rule. There’s a few different styles of horizontal rules built into the editor: default, dots, and wide. Here’s the base SCSS I’m currently using:
Buttons
Gutenberg has a button block with its own default styling applied. You’ll likely want to customize this to match your theme’s button styles.
For more information, see my Guide to Color Palettes and Button Styling.
Backend Styles
There are two ways you can add your theme styles to the Gutenberg block editor.
Option 1: Editor Styles
Your theme likely has editor styles added to make the classic editor more closely resemble the frontend. By default these are not loaded in Gutenberg, but you can turn it on.
WordPress is smart enough to automatically transform your styles so they only affect the block editor. With this approach, you can define a single set of styles that apply to both the classic and block editors. This is my preferred approach.
// Editor Styles
add_theme_support( 'editor-styles' );
add_editor_style( 'assets/css/editor-style.css' );The add_theme_support( 'editor-styles' ); tells WordPress to load the editor styles in the Gutenberg block editor. Without this, they would only load in the classic editor (TinyMCE).
The second line, add_editor_style(), is the path to your editor stylesheet.
See my base theme as an example.
Option 2: Enqueue Block Editor Assets
You can enqueue your own styles & scripts in Gutenberg using the enqueue_block_editor_assets hook. This works the same as loading styles & scripts on the frontend using wp_enqueue_scripts.
Do not load your entire frontend stylesheet in Gutenberg. You should only load relevant styles, and prepend them all with the .editor-styles-wrapper class to ensure it only applies to the editor (not the WP backend menu, metaboxes…).
SASS
Whichever approach you choose, I recommend using SASS partials. This will let you write your styles once and compile them into both the frontend and block editor stylesheets as necessary.
Here’s my main.scss file, which generates the main css file on the frontend, and my editor-style.scss file, which generates a CSS file for loading in Gutenberg.
- I’m only including relevant styles from the main stylesheet (style-guide and blocks)
- I have a gutenberg partial for Gutenberg-specific styles – styles that shouldn’t appear on the frontend. I’m using this to “undo” certain styles Gutenberg adds to elements, so those elements match my frontend.
- In the Gutenberg partial I’m setting the max width of blocks to match the site’s max width on the frontend (
$content-widthis defined in _base.scss)
Custom Blocks
While the core blocks are powerful, they may not serve all of your content creation needs, especially when it comes to complex pages like your homepage and landing pages.
Most of the sites I build include 6-12 custom blocks. You can build custom blocks with Advanced Custom Fields (my recommendation), or with JavaScript. You can also leverage block libraries like Atomic Blocks and Jetpack for additional block options.
Any more tips?
Do you have any recommendations for making custom themes more Gutenberg-ready?
David says
This is very helpful, Bill. Thank you!
Marcy Diaz says
I was just beginning to look into what would be needed to convert to Gutenberg. So this was perfect timing. Thank you, Bill!
Theresa Wagar says
Wow! I see a lot of work coming to make sure all my client sites can co-exist with Gutenburg. Thanks for the detailed start.
Shrinivas says
Hi Bill, thank you for sharing the note on customizing gutenberg, it’s really gonna help me to start with gutenberg.
Matt Ryan says
I just received my first request from a client asking that I do some testing to ensure the custom theme we developed for them is WP 5.0 / Gutenberg compatible. This post will form the basis of our action plan to set up a testing and validation process.
Many thanks for this Bill. Well done.
Jay says
Great read. Found this particularly funny given the circumstances…
“Clients will appreciate the effort to future-proof their site”
Future-proof, at least until the next time WordPress decides to make breaking changes. 😉
Anh Tran says
Hi Bill,
In the `.alignwide` class, why do you set the CSS “25”? Is that your theme’s specific style?
Bill Erickson says
You could use anything you like. It’s expected that the .alignwide class be some amount wider than the content area, and I picked half the distance between the left/right edge of the screen and the content area.
For the
.alignfullclass, the left/right margin ofcalc( 50% - 50vw)makes it expand the full width of the screen. Technically, it adds negative left/right margin equal to the space between the left/right side of the screen and the content area.For the
.alignwide, I cut this in half.calc( 25% - 25vw)makes the image take up half the gap between the left/right side of the screen and the content area.Clay Teller says
Hey Bill, thanks, this is great stuff. I’ve made heavy use of ACF Pro in a theme I’m currently developing, mainly for the “flexible content” fields. I know you’ve worked with ACF Pro in the past, so thought I would ask: Do you know if Gutenberg “blocks” will allow me to completely move away from a plugin like ACF, giving me the ability to add my own custom “blocks” to do what “flexible content” field allow me to do? If so, I would love to start transitioning completely away from using a plugin like ACF Pro or CMB2. Hoping this isn’t too specific a question for this post. Thanks!
Bill Erickson says
While it’s theoretically possible, it would likely require orders of magnitude more time to build (think 10-100x the time you spend with ACF). A better comparison would be building your own custom metabox with its flexible content field from scratch, except you’re doing it in JavaScript, a language with which you might not be as familiar.
I think most developers will use ACF or a similar plugin to create custom blocks, in the same way you use ACF now to create custom metaboxes. For now, I’m still using custom metaboxes for complex pages like this and disabling Gutenberg just on those templates.
Clay says
Bill, thanks so much for the quick reply. Hearing your thoughts on Gutenberg / ACF is super helpful.
Hans says
Very helpful, thank you Bill.
I’m looking forward to Gutenberg, but it’s a big change. Some flexibility of it might not be that desirable (like plugins like The Events Calendar Allowing to shift their structured content blocks to other places in each separate post instead of presenting a predictable user experience), but it is nice to have options for when it is needed.
One thing I especially wonder is how it will work regarding responsiveness. I would imagine that at least all size- and visibility-related attributes of blocks and text may need different settings for different device-sizes. Page builders tend to have attributes to select on which devices (large, medium, small) each block is shown and at what size and themes deliver that in a structural way, but when the content editor allows that to be changed, without that kind of responsiveness options, than small devices may not get an optimal experience. I imagine that might still be developed , since it is an obvious requirement, but it is something I’m too looking for.
Images is an obvious subject there, since testing tools advice on compressing images and using smaller file-sizes on smaller displays. I have found it to be an increasing complicated subject in the responsive era and standard themes often seem to just use larger images for all displays, like it seems this website does too. I wonder how having users grow and shrink images at will in a page/content builder like Gutenberg will impact image delivery and related source-code and if that will be a subject for WordPress core or theme-developers to solve.
Thanks,
Hans
Bill Erickson says
The blocks themselves come with their own styling to ensure they work well across all devices. For instance, a pull quote appears full width on mobile but floated to the left or right on tablet and desktop.
Beyond the ability to add custom CSS classes to blocks, I don’t think there’s any plan for providing options to control the look at different break points. It’s up to the theme developer to style those blocks effectively.
This is a good example of why page builder plugins are not going away. They’ll likely shift to providing users more options in the Gutenberg editor.
To your question regarding images, this is why WordPress has built-in support for srcset. Users can insert an image, and along with it include a list of smaller images the browser can use if they are a better fit.
As a theme developer, the best thing you can do is ensure all (or most) of your custom image sizes use the same aspect ratio so there’s multiple sizes in the srcset.
Hans says
Thanks for the reaction, Bill. I know of the srcset support of WordPress, but that only adds like your last sentence says images with the same aspect ratio to the srcset, and when the design isn’t based on that and the mobile view needs another ratio ( f.i. because on mobile a background-image of a cta or title would need more height on mobile phones) then one needs to fiddle still and the default srcset of wordpress isn’t enough.
Plugins like Woocommerce also might decide to change the way they crop images (or in case of woo not allow to crop single product images) and change the rules again. But we have to cope.
By the way there is discussion going on Gutenberg in GitHub about adding a wrapper block to insert responsiveness to the editor, so the community is actively thinking about this problem and might yet present an answer. To not do so, would decrease the usability of some options it provides. The wrapper block would helas mean responsiveness would be implemented by replicating all blocks for each breakpoint and use display:none to regulate which is shown, so it’s an easy coding solution, but not very elegant or lean.
The solution of having the theme handle responsiveness might be challenged by the fact that Gutenberg allows to set font-sizes and such by the editor and adds a “style=…” attribute to the element to implement this. Since now that is inline styling (high priority) and users can change image-sizes and font-sizes at will, the theme can no longer easily control how everything is presented.
That’s why page builders need to be quite complete in the options of each element to be usable. The builder basically replaces the theme’s functionality for the ui-element. I don’t know how all that inline styling will effect SEO, not to speak about duplicating lots of content when wrapper blocks are implemented for responsiveness, but Gutenberg will most likely move some control from the theme to the editor and in the end visions that visitors themselves will control how they want to see modules on their display, making unclear what roles themes will have (if any) in that future. It’s a step unto new territory. Exiting times.
Page builders will probably decide whether to adopt the editor in their page building ways, or find a way to keep using their own version and interface. Since lots of them are front-end editors by now, it will probably be both if they want to keep using an admin-editor too.
Given Gutenberg i would imagine that lots of new elements will be provided by others too, especially the plugins that now provide them by shortcodes, hopefully will shift to Gutenberg. But there are offcourse still many (see reviews of the Gutenberg plugin) that don’t like what Gutenberg is doing and want to keep just a non-WYSIWYG text-editor.
We’ll see. Right now, I welcome Gutenberg and the vision of the drivers of it.
Taylor says
Thanks for all your Gutenberg posts. I’m updating my starter theme in preparation and I’ve found your posts helpful.
Two questions about the full-width alignment.
In the back-end, Gutenberg seems to style the align-full to grow an image if it is too small. Using these align-full styles, images only grow up to their 100%. Gutenberg has it easy though because the back-end editor isn’t inside of a max-width box.
Second, any solution I’ve found (regardless of over-scaling the images or not) results in a horizontal scrollbar because vw includes the vertical scrollbar if present. It’s not present in demos that don’t induce the scrollbar. You can do things like calc( 100vw – 17px ) to accommodate it, but it’s not even constant and will be less than full-width if there doesn’t happen to be a scrollbar.
Have you come across that? I almost always do a max-width container for all the page content, but this makes me wonder if instead the descendants of the main content area should get the max-width instead (except for full-width ones, of course).
Sal Ferrarello says
Hi Taylor and Bill,
I’m having this same problem with a horizontal scroll bar appearing (if the content is long enough to trigger a vertical scroll bar). I’ve found that wrapping everything in a div and setting
overflow:hidden;eliminates the vertical scroll bar (in Genesis I’m using thediv.site-containerelement for this). I don’t love this solution but it is the best I’ve found thus far. I’ve written a blog post about this at https://salferrarello.com/full-screen-width-image-inside-container/.Thanks for this post Bill, it’s been a great help.