So I’ve been mucking around with the WordPress site editor, a new-ish bit of functionality that’s come in over the last several WordPress releases, and which is supposed to make it easier for you to design a website without having to really dig into the underlying code.
I am… unconvinced.
My problem is that I’m enough of a power user in WordPress to be comfortable with that underlying code, whether it’s adding extra CSS to do stuff or spinning off a child theme in PHP to customize what I want things to do. The UI for the site editor, right now, feels like it’s making things more complicated for me, not less.
Case in point: there are different templates you can use for different types of pages on the site. For example, one for pages, one for your blog home, one for single blog posts, etc. But if I want all of my pages to have an overall unified look, that means I have to edit every single one of those templates. At least so far from what I’ve seen, using the Twenty Twenty-Three theme.
And I have to dig into different places in the editor for the same page, depending on what I want to do. If I want to rearrange layout of a page, I have to go to the Templates section. But if I want to alter styles, I have to go over into the Styles section. This does not feel smooth and easy, WordPress. Don’t make me have to look in different places to edit attributes of the same damn thing.
To make matters more vexing, I’m running into issues with differing functionality depending on what type of page template I’m playing with. On standalone pages, I created a Cover block to use the page’s featured image. I tried to do the same thing on the Posts page, where the blog posts are shown.
But I discovered that even if I set a Featured Image on the Posts page, the Cover block does not pull that image in. Instead, it grabs the Featured Image off of whatever is my most recent post.
Which that seems like a bug to me. A workaround would be to remember to set featured images on each of my posts, but historically I haven’t wanted to do that. (Mostly because when I crosspost over to Dreamwidth, if I set a Featured Image, it fucks up formatting of the post over there.) For now, though, I will have to reconsider.
And I’ve created a bunch more header images that I can pick and choose from on posts. If I’m going to have to remember to set Featured Images on every post I make on this site, the least I can do is make it more interesting by varying them up.
Longer-term, though, this smells like an issue I’ll have to resolve by digging into the PHP of the theme and seeing if I can tweak something to make the Posts page use its own Featured Image, not the one off the most recent post. More on this as I investigate it.
And in the meantime, hey, at least I have some additional pretty graphics to use as headers.
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