Trying to wrap your brain around WordPress Block Themes these days, is enough to get one’s head spinning. As a developer of themes, should I be embracing this new paradigm? Does it make my job as a developer easier? Does it make the experience of my client better as well? These are some of the important things to consider when making this decision.

I recently took a “first look” at the TwentyTwentyFour theme, which ships with new WP installs as of this writing. This is a block theme, which fully embraces the new paradigm, in contrast to older, “classic” themes using PHP and the template hierarchy we all know and understand.

Watch it here:

Ultimately, the conclusion I reach is that, compared to a Statamic project, this is a really challenging and frustrating thing to use when you are wanting to develop a fully custom theme.

Out of the box, it uses HTML “template” files for a number of pages, totally bypassing the usual Pages entries in the database. The new Site Editor confuses this stuff, such that when you edit the homepage there, there is no “homepage” entry in the traditional Admin dashboard - you are forced into the Site Editor, with no templates available to edit.

In addition, all of this is saved into the database. When it comes to “the content,” separating UI from data in the database hasn’t been a thing in WordPress for some time, though plugins like ACF allow for this to a certain degree. Instead, Block Themes fully embrace saving all of this in the DB with its HTML comment syntax save serialized data.

Gone is the “just change the theme” approach to putting a new skin on your WordPress website. In a Block Theme, the marriage of content and the UI in the database is complete.

Compared to Statamic

The landscape for starter themes in WordPress is kind of the wild west. There is no official WP starter theme that I can find that comes with CSS and JS build tools configured for you.

Rather, we are on our own using something like Sage, or rolling our own starter themes with Underscores or _TW (a great project IMO).

Moving over to Statamic: in a more traditional approach, the fields in the dashboard directly correspond to templates in the file system, and creating your own markup and styles around your data is a much simpler matter.

A fresh Statamic site comes with a mature build setup for the front end, with Tailwind baked-in (and easily removed if that’s not your thing), with a modern build system using Vite. This is a great starting place for build one’s own Starter Kit, which is roughly equivalent (in WP terms) to a pre-built, opinionated theme, but one over which you again have full control.

Better for devs, better for editors

I read somewhere recently that despite the push to making WordPress available to the non-developer with Block Themes, 95% of typical WordPress projects these days still require the help of a developer. With this in mind, why would we opt for a Block Theme these days when the overhead for managing one seems so high?

One criticism of Statamic is that it absolutely requires a developer. While this is true, if the vast majority of WP sites need one as well, what then is the difference?

If both the editing experience and the developer experience is superior, it seems like a no-brainer to go choose Statamic today. From where I’m standing, the new Block Theme paradigm does not make the experience better for the client, nor does it make my life as a developer any easier. Instead, I believe the opposite is true.

If I can achieve a superior editing experience for my client, while being enabled to do my best work as a developer, the choice is clear.