The State of Gutenberg and WordPress Themes

…or

“A Realistic Look at Using 3rd Party Gutenberg Blocks in Your Theme”

…or

“Keep Your Plugin Blocks Out of My Theme”

…or

“Shortcodes All Over Again”

…or

“The Never Ending Battle to Style a Button Consistently”

…or

“We Still Have a Long Way to Go”


I would like to preface this article by saying that these thoughts and opinions are in no way meant to diminish the amazing work that the Gutenberg team has done (and continues to do). I love writing in Gutenberg. I follow the GitHub repository closely, often reading 100+ notifications each day. I have been testing since early versions. I have left feedback. Things have gotten much better. However this article is meant to take a realistic and somewhat critical look at how Gutenberg is being presented on a grander scale vs. some of the realities that come in to play when implementing these ideas.

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Use Customizer Color Settings to Create a Gutenberg Color Palette

Most WordPress themes within the past few years have included helpful options in the WordPress customizer to help users quickly and easily modify how their theme behaves and looks. In fact, it is a requirement to list your theme on WordPress.org to only use the Customize API and not the Settings API.

With the new Gutenberg editor (soon to take over the role of just “the editor”) a new use-case for these custom colors has risen. Gutenberg offers the ability to define a custom color palette that can be used wherever blocks allow colors to be chosen. By default this includes paragraph text and background colors.

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