(Note: I'm not affiliated with any of the mentioned products or companies.)
This Udemy course, taught by Michael Davies, offers extensive instruction on how to build a website using WordPress' Full Site Editor.
Although I had previous experience with WordPress and their new editor I though that it would be interesting to go through the whole process and see if I was missing something.
Currently, many of WP themes are compatible with blocks and within these, there are two approaches:
- using Full Site Editor theme + blocks
- using a customizable theme + blocks
The main difference between these two is that the former uses templates based on blocks to organize the site while the latter one uses site customization parameters in the left panel of the Customize Site section.
This course focuses on the Full Site Editor and uses Twenty Twenty-Two theme to build a site from the beginning to the end using Gutenberg blocks. All the steps are explained in detail and are easy to follow.
I won't go into details but the parts of the course I found most interested were:
- the importance of planning and preparation: the course provides a good question list to start brainstorming about the website content, structure, UX and design, as well as the role of wireframes
- the self-hosted installation by using AMPPS has been explained in detail and seems straightforward. Personally I think there are better solutions (not mentioned in the course) that I wrote about in this post.
- all the WP updates and changes from the version 5.9 to 6.4 have been covered extensively and it was interesting to see how things are evolving. It is obvious that this is still work-in-progress and that there will be future changes. From the get-go WP is not very intuitive and this makes it sometimes even more confusing to use.
- It is important to have a mental model of all the possible style overrides.
- staring from WordPress 6.0 there is an auto-generated option for adding a blog page to the website.
The downside of the course is that the sections about security and SEO are not at the same level as the rest of the course - these topics have been barely touched. The author hints some future lessons in these two areas but as of April 2024 they haven't been integrated.
Overall, this is a solid course good for those starting with WordPress or the ones transitioning from the classic editor.