There’s tons of things I love about WordPress and I still think it’s where I want to be long term because of where it’s headed and the values and communities it lives in.
As of right now there’s 3 relatively large challenges I see with WordPress though.
- Theming support (light/dark/other)
- Post types/formats not being distinguished
- Number 3, maybe lack of flexibility or availability of some blocks
I know there’s plenty of other challenges, but these are the biggest ones I keep running into as of right now. Here’s a few more details about them.
Theming
Even I talk about theming here I’m talking about more support within WordPress themes for automatic style changes. The best example I can give right now is how Figma handles theming with tokens. It’s a really simple and also robust system that (as far as I can tell) uses existing technologies and dev tools/patterns. You basically assign a name to a color and then you can assign different color values to that name depending on the theme you want.
For example, let’s say I want to have a light and dark theme and for my website or web app to automatically match whatever the user has selected on their device. Pretty basic stuff in 2024. With a system like tokens I can say, here’s a color (I like using hex values). I want this color to be called “primary” because it’s going to be used as the primary color for my digital experience. Usually this means it will be used for anything that I want to give a lot of emphasis to, but I get to decide the parameters when creating (and evolving/updating) my design system. Then I can group that color into the “light theme” (or whatever group/label makes sense for my brand and needs). Now that I established the token as primary and assigned a color value, I can assign another color value with a different hex code that’s grouped into “dark theme”. I can do this for as many colors as my brand needs and the goal is so that now whenever anyone visits my digital experience, they’ll have an experience that matches their preferred default theme.
Of course, if we wanna get really wild, I could create other theme variants like ocean, sunset, or literally anything I want and give people the chance to toggle different themes outside of basic light and dark. This, of course, is much more technically complex and can be explored as a possible option later, but the light and dark theme basics I hope to be covered soon.
As it stands right now, WordPress has a decent custom color system that I used to set up color tokens that match my brand. I really like the solid base they’ve built. For me what’s next is extending the system slightly to allow one more variant and automatically switching between the 2 to match the device theme. I imagine this might be possible with some web dev, but I’m talking about native support in the block theme editor with something maybe similar to Figma. I feel like they created a pretty solid system for this. Very excited and hope this is something that’s being considered or worked on already.
Post Formats
I know this is something that’s been considered quite a bit in depth at this GitHub link (and probably other places too) but I lost track of where it’s at and don’t know if it’s still being considered. If it is, how can I help the conversation move forward? This is such an incredibly cool idea and I’m very excited for it. Plus I feel like it got so close to being resolved already!
As a new WordPress creator myself, I was really excited about the option to use WordPress for all sorts of content and to not be restricted to one type like a lot of other social platforms do. You can read more about this in my brand page or other places like this, but the basic concept is that I’m building a digital identity and space/experience for everything “me”. I dont want images over there, video in another spot, text somewhere else, because its all me and I want to have it all bundled up in one spot so that I can simplify my creativity process and so that anyone who’s interested in anything related to me knows where to find it and it keep growing and evolving with my throughout my life. 🤩😍
I’m seriously SOOO excited about this!! I’m stoked for where I’m going, how I got here and everything WordPress and so many other open source and community driven projects provide to help me build this beautiful digital corner of the universe just for me. Thank you!!
But, even though I can currently post whatever content format I want (text, images, audio, video), they currently have the same visual styling and restrictions and I want to be able to adjust that and decide how each type is displayed. Again, that GitHub link covers this concept very deeply and I think the people talking about it were all moving in a fantastic direction and trying to consider all the variables. So hopefully it’s still moving somewhere and we’ll have it soon! If not, I definitely wanna help, cuz I love designing solutions to really wicked problems like this one. 😁😏 I’m trying to figure out if I can connect with the community ob Matrix instead of Slack cuz I don’t like Slack much, but we’ll see. Ultimately I want to get involved as soon as possible.
Block Flexibility
There’s also still some pretty core blocks missing from the block editor, imo. Don’t get me wrong I’m extremely impressed with the block editor and absolutely love building with it! 🎉🙌 But I run into small gaps here and there with things like, there’s a “like post” block from WordPress and some community built plugins that offer similar functionality, but the default block doesn’t show up in my block editor and both it and the community plugins don’t seem to offer quite what I’m looking for.
The things I want are:
- Complete customizability over the UI
- Like and unlike
I also really want a share button that’s not specific to any social platform. Preferably it would open the native share sheet on the device and for devices that don’t have it, the post would be copied to the clipboard for sharing.