The upcoming 5.9 release of WordPress will include a new feature called Full Site Editing (FSE). Simply put. this takes the still newish block editor and allows you to build your site design with it. FSE promises to free site owners from relying on custom theme development to lay out their sites the way they want them.

That’s the theory, anyway. It relies on themes to support full site editing and sites are still subject to style restrictions from the theme.

I’ve been so busy administering WordPress sites and their underlying systems that my knowledge of WordPress has fallen woefully behind. The only way to remedy this was to build my own full site editing theme. This time I wanted to do my own CSS and HTML5 instead of relying on frameworks.

The result is Ukiyo-e, named after the Japanese woodblock technique.

You can grab a copy from the Ukiyo-e github repository. Not sure if I will submitted it to the official repository.

You can currently see the Ukiyo-e theme in action at allrite.net. I may remove it from that site and use it elsewhere at a later date.

It’s still rough around the edges. The main thing was to experiment with FSE and different CSS techniques.

I found FSE development a rather frustrating experience. It is not a real templating language. You have no conditionals, no options to get WordPress object values. Block options are static in the layouts.

Documentation is also rather lacking and, as the functionality is still under development, it can be outdated. I found WordPress Full Site Editing to be the most useful resource.