Full-site Editing MVP: Can I Build a Landing Page?

Josepha Haden Chomphosy was the featured guest on the inaugural episode of the WPTavern Jukebox podcast, hosted by Nathan Wrigley. In their conversation, they covered a lot of ground. The show is definitely worth your 40 minutes of listen.

Around minute 23 of the audio they talked a bit more about Full-Site Editing and its merge into the core. Chomphosy said she knows ‘this summer’ is an ambitions goal, and she also assured the listeners that the team won’t release something that’s not functional and usable.

Go/NoGo Mid to End of April

The Core release and Gutenberg teams will make the Go/NoGo decision to merge Full-Site Editing for the next WordPress release in July (5.8) on April 17 or on April 23. In other words, the state of Full Site editing in Gutenberg plugin version 10.4 and 10.5. If it doesn’t get merged into 5.8, Full-Site Editing will be merged in WordPress 5.9 to be released in December 2021

Chomphosy also shared her – unofficial – benchmark of what should be possible with the prototype of the Site Editor by April: Can you – without writing code – create a landing page with Full-site editing tools. She calls it “the smallest viable sentence. The I-AM of websites.”

A Landing page is the smallest viable unit

This single web page consists of a header, a footer, a hero image with a button, some text, a form or a call to action. This narrows the focus of the MVP, the prototype, considerably. It also increases the probability that the first low-key, opt-in version of Full-Site editing might actually make it into the next WordPress version. A narrow scope will also help content creators, teachers and developers get started working on their discovery of the new WordPress feature. As soon as it is merged into WordPress core, plugin developer and theme builders can test their ideas against it and get familiar with the underlying concepts.

It’s a good way to ease-in content creators, too. When you are not dealing with the header and footer of a big site, but just for a single page, it’s not so critical if you get lost on the way from content editing to template part (header, footer) editing and back again. It’s all on the same page, literally.

This transition was one of the major causes of confusion during the first few testing calls for the FSE outreach program and the developers are working on making it less confusing. With this unofficial benchmark of a single landing page creation, the team will have additional time and input on how to better handle that switch between editing a template that is used for many pages and the content of a single post or page content.

A very tangible goal, “Can I build a landing page with the tools available?” makes it straightforward for WordPress contributors who work on the parts that make that are not code, like documentation, marketing, training and testing.

Call For Testing: Create a Header

The 4th call for testing via the WordPress FSE-Outreach program asks you to create a header for a Restaurant. Anne McCarthy has detailed instructions for you as well as video if you are in a testing mood. Your input is definitely wanted!

Chomphosy also added that Matias Ventura, the technical lead for Gutenberg, might have different benchmarks for the MVP. I am curious, and answer Josepha’s call for questions on Full-Site Editing for her next episode of the WPBriefing podcast when Matias will be her guest.

Full-Side Editing project encompasses a lot more than the Site Editor with template parts. There are Global Styles, Widgets in Customizer, a new Navigation and Widget screen, block-based themes with a theme.json file and query block. Some of it will work its way into the MVP. We will see how far the team progresses on their journey, that will only begin once Full-Site editing comes to Millions of WordPress users. No Fear, though. It will all be opt-in. Nothing will break.

“Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow” — Eric Raymond’s Linus’ Law