The other day I was wanting to experiment with FSE.
Sigh.
Yeah. A bit of a weird term. Acronym really. More to the point another thing that may just confuse a few more people. The reason I say this is because it stands for Full Site Editing.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m looking forward to this. I am. The reason being is that it may help a lot of people in creating their sites to suit their wants. The how is the part I’m kind behind on. I haven’t completely kept up with many of the things being done.
Why now?
The reason I’m posting this now is because some time ago I was reached out to by member of the Theme Team. I haven’t done a theme review in a long time. I mean that too. I haven’t actually looked at theme’s code for things in quite some time. Part of that is because I do have a few other things I was doing. I spent most of my free time just relaxing. It’s something I haven’t really been able to do. The other reason being that I never really set a schedule for outside of work so any free time would be anything.
With that being said, I went and tried to setup something on my local installation. This hurt a little because I opted to not install a lot of things. I wanted quite literally the bare minimum to just get up and running. I installed XAMPP and boom. Got things working in under maybe 30 minutes.
I mean it wasn’t much.
- Install Gutenberg
- Activate Gutenberg
- Enable Full Site Editing
Not much to it. Now the other part that took a bit longer was actually seeing how I could maybe partake in contributing with either docs or code.
Let the fun begin
This part was a little more. More time. Okay, like almost an hour of trying to install one thing to make everything work. Now, you’re probably asking or even wondering, but Jose, why not use something like VVV or Docker to set up your environment?
Again, I wanted the bare minimum to just start. This is where things actually took a bit of a turn. I did already have NodeJS installed so that was sorted. I already had Git because that was one of the other things I installed when I got my Windows machine fully built. The things I needed were:
- NodeJS
- Git
- Python
Yeah. Python.
In all honesty I’m not sure if that was one thing I did the first time I set up my local machine which a very long time ago when I was first starting with WordPress. I might have done it when I wanted to learn random languages I know that much but don’t really recall doing that times after that. It might be because after switching to something other than Windows, Python might have already been installed and running.
Anyway.
The part I that I really wanted to experiment on was following the guide on getting the Full Site Editing experience going. Part of that reason I do still like dabbling with code when I can. At least when it comes to WordPress theming code. Plugins I still just love to look over how they work and break more than anything.
Now, I’ve been doing things like this for some time but it really did feel like something was missing when I was following the steps. It really almost felt like I was out of the loop with how things worked. There were some things I had to actually read in order to understand what was going and how to do it.
The part I am really looking more forward to is being able to use HTML template parts. I think it is that inner part of me that loves the simplicity of it. I love knowing that it does have a low barrier of entry. It is part of that reason I genuinely love WordPress.
That is the biggest reason I love code too.