Noren Anders, developer lead of Twenty Twenty theme, one of favorite default themes after the current Twenty Twenty-Two theme, reflects on Gutenberg block themes and classic themes and writes in his personal website that classic themes provide more flexibilities to theme authors than the block-based themes.

Block themes are getting better with every Gutenberg release, but to me, they’re not as fun to design and build as classic themes. Classic themes are more flexible for the developer at the cost of flexibility for the users, while block themes are less flexible for the developer but more flexible for the users. I miss the flexibility of building classic themes. That probably makes me a selfish developer.Noren Anders

In Ander’s assessment, the block themes are “still pretty finicky when it comes to the finer details – especially on small screens. Maybe we’ll get there by spring 2023. The spring 2022 redesign is still a classic WordPress theme built with PHP and CSS.”

Note: This post is 3-part leaning note series towards understanding creating additional template types using full site editing (FSE) interface. This learning post is still in active development and updated regularly. Traditionally, block themes allow creating some common template types like front-page, single, page, archive, search, 404 and index. However, in classic themes other templates […]