ThemeShaper

There’s been an exciting discussion happening around the changes that Gutenberg will bring to themes. At Automattic, we’ve begun to prepare for Gutenberg by reevaluating our theme design and development processes.

As part of that work, I did some thinking about how I might start designing a block-driven theme today and what sorts of resources I’d want to have. The most important thing that came to mind was a way to access and customize all of the core Gutenberg blocks with a few clicks. This would allow me to quickly test and iterate on block design without having to dig into code. I do a good deal of my design work in Sketch, so I began to search for a way to make this possible there.

Luckily, there are already a few Gutenberg-related Sketch files in the wild. The Gutenberg Contributors page on GitHub and the Design Principles & Vision page on WordPress.org are great places to start. These are mostly aimed at the Gutenberg editing interface, however, and didn’t quite accomplish what I was looking for, so I ended up building a new file instead:

This new Sketch file contains symbols for all of the default Gutenberg blocks (with the exception of all the embeds, since those aren’t very customizable). With this set of symbols, it’s possible to quickly build a layout composed entirely of Gutenberg blocks using Sketch:

It’s actually pretty fun to use! In a way, it’s Gutenberg — but for Sketch. 😄
From here, it’s easy to start customizing styles:

I took this method for a spin and tried to mock up a theme for an imagined restaurant. To get started, I built out the page structure using default Gutenberg blocks:

From there, I started doing some light customizing. I cut myself off after a while, but the end result looked fairly decent:

I find this pretty cool. It’s an example of what a block-driven theme might look like with just a little bit of CSS customization.

From here, I could easily keep going and put together a complete, modular design system for this theme by customizing the rest of the Gutenberg blocks. I could view the blocks all at once on the Symbols page, and quickly build out a wide variety of layout options to make sure my styles held up to intense layout customization.

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I almost ended there, but I decided to confront a lingering concern I’ve had about Gutenberg: I’ve feared that if we lean too much on Gutenberg for theme layout, we’ll end up with lots of very similar, “blocky” themes. The restaurant site I designed above looks fine, but it’s also clearly made of blocks. I wondered if it’d be possible to create something more experimental using this same Sketch file as a base.

So I took another stab at a pretend site design (this time for a band named Superserious), and forced myself to break out of the blocks a little more. Again, I began with a pure-Gutenberg layout:

But this time, I was much more aggressive in my customization and aimed for a more tailored mobile experience with bold typography:

This was a fun exercise, and it helped allay my fears a bit. That first Cover Image has all the usual pieces, but they’re styled in a very opinionated way. The rest of the blocks are fairly standard, but they still stand out because they exist within a heavily stylized, off-balance frame. The overall effect is drastically different from the theme in the previous exercise.

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This process was very useful for me, and I’d love to see if it’s useful for the rest of the community as well. You can download and contribute to the Sketch files here:

https://github.com/Automattic/gutenberg-themes-sketch

The repository includes a basic Sketch file with just the symbols, plus all the text hierarchy styles (H1, H2, etc). I also created a library file in case that’s preferable for anyone. We hope to update these files periodically, and would love to hear feedback from others who use them.

In the meantime, we’ll keep experimenting with ways to design themes in this new Gutenberg-based future.

At the Automattic Theme Team meetup in December, we focused on several Gutenberg-related projects. The first one we’re sharing is a set of Gutenberg-friendly themes based on Underscores.

The project’s goal was to help us think about our themes differently, dig into adding theme support for Gutenberg, and as a byproduct, do some testing of Gutenberg itself.

Six team members participated in this project, and it resulted in three themes which are still in progress, and currently available on GitHub.

What is Gutenberg?

Gutenberg is the new block-based content editor currently being developed in GitHub for WordPress 5.0. Until it’s merged into core, it’s available as a plugin.

It’s really going to change the WordPress publishing experience! From the WordPress.org Gutenberg page:

The Gutenberg editor uses blocks to create all types of content, replacing a half-dozen inconsistent ways of customizing WordPress, bringing it in line with modern coding standards, and aligning with open web initiatives. These content blocks transform how users, developers, and hosts interact with WordPress to make building rich web content easier and more intuitive, democratizing publishing — and work — for everyone, regardless of technical ability.

The Themes

The three themes we developed during the meetup are called Fashion Blog, Handicraft, and Ohana. We decided to try to make these themes CSS-only to help keep the focus on Gutenberg itself and let us build on the recent work the team’s been doing with Style Packs. This turned out to be an ambitious restriction — a little more on that later — but it made for an interesting design challenge.

Fashion Blog, Handicraft and Ohana are currently available on GitHub; you can learn more about each theme there and check out exactly how they were set up. The themes are still works in progress and have some rough edges. The end goal is to get them ready for WordPress.com.

The Process

Over the course of a few days, we researched and decided on an audience for each theme, designed and built them, and added Gutenberg support.

We opted to use a one-column design for all three themes, to best accommodate the “full” and “wide” block alignment options in Gutenberg.

Adding Gutenberg Support

You don’t actually have to do anything to use Gutenberg with a theme, but by declaring theme support you can add two optional features: the “wide” alignments (full width and wide width), and custom colors for the block-color palettes.

The following example, when included in the setup function in functions.php, will add both:

/**
* Add support for Gutenberg.
*
* @link https://wordpress.org/gutenberg/handbook/reference/theme-support/
*/
add_theme_support( 'gutenberg', array(

    // Theme supports wide images, galleries and videos.
    'wide-images' => true,

    // Make specific theme colors available in the editor.
    'colors' => array(
        '#ffffff',
        '#000000',
        '#cccccc',
    ),

) );

Whether or not you include custom colors in your theme, Gutenberg will always include a color picker with the palette, for further customization.

Styling the Themes

In general, the default blocks don’t need styling — Gutenberg already includes styles that match each block’s functionality. For example, the Gallery block already has the styles needed to split your galleries into different columns, and the Cover Image block will place the text and image added on top of each other, without the theme’s help.

If any of the styles don’t fully suit your theme’s design, you can adjust them as needed. One thing we noticed while we were developing these themes was Gutenberg’s distinct pill-shaped button style, which might not work with every theme.

On the flip side, themes are fully responsible for figuring out how the “wide” and “full” alignment styles should be handled, if they support them. This makes sense, since support is optional, and exactly how they should look can vary depending on a theme’s individual style.

At the time of writing, the Gutenberg theme styles these two alignments by setting max-widths for specific HTML elements, with a wider max width when either the .widealign or .fullalign classes are used.

In our three themes, we approached it a bit differently, setting a max-width for the page content, and instead using CSS to stretch those wider elements outside of it. We used vw and stretched the wider elements based on the screen size:

@media (min-width: 750px) {

    .alignfull {
        margin-left: calc(50% - 50vw);
        margin-right: calc(50% - 50vw);
        width: auto;
        max-width: 1000%;
    }

    .alignwide {
        margin-left: calc(25% - 25vw);
        margin-right: calc(25% - 25vw);
        width: auto;
        max-width: 1000%;
    }

}

This approach works, but because vw includes the width of the vertical scrollbar as part of the whole screen width, you can get a little horizontal scrolling. One fix is adding overflow: hidden to one of the page-width elements further up the HTML tree.

If you didn’t want these elements’ widths to be based on screen size, you could also set a specific max-width. There’s no one “right” way to approach these styles, and I’m sure more and more examples will come out of the woodwork as more themes add styles for Gutenberg. For example, Justin Tadlock has shared his method using different calc values, and Joen Asmussen has blogged about his approach of applying max-widths to all child elements that aren’t wide or full width.

In our themes, we also kept any block-specific styles separate in their own stylesheet.

Adding Editor Styles

To make the editing experience more what-you-see-is-what-you-get, you can add Gutenberg editor styles using enqueue_block_editor_assets. It’s similar to how editor styles can be enqueued for the current TinyMCE editor. This makes sure what a user sees when building their pages best matches how the content will actually look with your theme when published.

Here’s an example of enqueuing an editor-specific stylesheet:

/**
* Enqueue editor styles for Gutenberg
*/

function theme_slug_editor_styles() {
    wp_enqueue_style( 'theme-slug-editor-style', get_template_directory_uri() . '/assets/stylesheets/editor-style.css' );
}
add_action( 'enqueue_block_editor_assets', 'theme_slug_editor_styles' );

Like with the TinyMCE editor, you can also include fonts. So for example, if your theme is enqueuing fonts from Google, you can include them in the Gutenberg editor, too:

/**
* Enqueue editor styles for Gutenberg
*/

function theme_slug_editor_styles() {
    wp_enqueue_style( 'theme-slug-editor-style', get_template_directory_uri() . '/assets/stylesheets/editor-style.css' );
    wp_enqueue_style( 'theme-slug-fonts', theme_slug_fonts_url(), array(), null );
}
add_action( 'enqueue_block_editor_assets', 'theme_slug_editor_styles' );

Unlike the TinyMCE editor, Gutenberg’s editor styles include the post title:

The editor styles need to be pretty specific to make sure they’re not applied to other elements of the page outside of the editor — Rich Tabor has a good post here about his experience with this behavior. Gutenberg includes specific classes around different elements in the editor, so you can prefix selectors more generally with the class .editor-post-visual-editor, or use more specific classes to target individual blocks — for example, styles for .editor-block-list__block[data-type="core/heading"] h1 would only be applied to h1s inside of a Heading block.

What We Learned

Overall, this project was a great way to ramp up quickly on some Gutenberg-theming basics, and get our feet wet. Some specific things we learned from this process include:

• The Gutenberg default block styles are numerous and can be a bit opinionated. This is good, in that you can rely on Gutenberg to do a lot of the heavy lifting, but there are some styles that would need to be updated to match individual theme styles.
• It can be tricky to set up the wide and full-width styles; as more themes add styles for Gutenberg, it’ll be interesting to see all the different ways themes handle this.
• Setting up the block styles for the back-end editing experience was more involved than any of us had anticipated. It’s very much like adding editor styles to the current TinyMCE editor, but some Gutenberg blocks have very specific classes that needed to be overridden.

We also learned a couple non-Gutenberg related things:

• From a project-planning perspective, we could have spent more time narrowing down the kinds of themes we wanted to build — and the actual designs — prior to the meetup. This would have left more time to focus on the Gutenberg part of each theme.
• In the end, it wasn’t possible to complete the project without making edits to these themes in addition to CSS. On top of the PHP changes needed to support Gutenberg’s optional features, we needed to make edits for common WordPress.com-functionality — like adding social menus, and more Content Options support — and for the designs themselves, like enqueuing Google fonts.

Next Steps

Our goal is to get these themes launched on WordPress.com. To get there, they still need some WordPress.com-specific functionality, like the annotations for WordPress.com’s custom fonts and colors, WooCommerce support, and styles for WordPress.com widgets.

We hope that sharing this process is helpful for your own Gutenberg journey as themers. We’d love to hear about your adventures.