WordPress Block Themes and Full Site Editing
A complete course in WordPress 7.0 block themes: theme.json, templates and patterns, building blocks, the Interactivity API, and shipping an accessible theme.
- Modules
- 02
- Lessons
- 06
- Reading time
- 2H 55M
- Words
- 10,494
What you will be able to do
- Structure a block theme so the template hierarchy resolves correctly.
- Drive typography, spacing and colour from theme.json instead of hard-coded CSS.
- Build both static and dynamic blocks and register them server-side.
- Add client-side behaviour with the Interactivity API rather than a custom framework.
- Apply block-level CSS and responsive visibility deliberately.
- Ship a theme that is accessible, fast and passes theme review.
Before you start
Comfortable with PHP, HTML and CSS, and some JavaScript for the editor-side lessons. A local WordPress 7.0 install with a block theme active.
Still being written
2 of 6 modules are finished and readable now. The remaining 4 are in progress and will appear here as they are published. Nothing already written is removed, and the lessons below will not change underneath you.
Block themes replaced a decade of PHP template files with a declarative system, and the people who found that change hardest were the ones who knew the old system best. The mental model is genuinely different: a template is data, styling flows from a single JSON file into CSS custom properties, and a theme's job is increasingly to define tokens rather than to write selectors.
This course covers WordPress 7.0, which added a Font Library, block-level custom CSS, responsive visibility controls, and PHP-only block registration. It builds a theme from an empty directory, covering the template hierarchy first because nothing else makes sense until you know which file handles a given URL. Blocks come next, both static and dynamic, then the Interactivity API for the behaviour a static block cannot express.
The final module is about the part that separates a theme that works on your machine from one that can be distributed: accessibility, performance under real content, and testing against the plugins people actually run.
Curriculum
2 modules, 6 lessons
Block themes and theme.json
Theme structure, the style engine, presets, custom properties and style variations.
3 lessons · 1H 25M
Templates and patterns
The block template hierarchy, template parts, patterns, synced patterns and the Site Editor.
3 lessons · 1H 30M
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