I’ve been using WordPress since 2005. I used Blogger in 2004 and hand crafted before that. That’s 17 years on the same product for this blog. It’s an absolute miracle that a single product could sustain itself, modernize, and innovate for that long. And frankly, they have dominated website hosting for small businesses.
WordPress powers 455 million (37% of total) websites on the internet in 2021. That’s 10% more than in 2016 when they powered only 25% of websites.
https://www.envisagedigital.co.uk/wordpress-market-share/
Today, I upgraded to version 5.9. This introduced a new site editor and new theme called Twenty Twenty Two. It is such a huge departure from the previous editing experience I am surprised they didn’t call it WordPress 6.0.
The editor is now more WYSIWYG than before. This is a good thing in general, but has many pitfalls. It’s easy to get confused, especially with a system that has this much nesting.
In their system, the templates and template parts are reused, but it’s hard to tell if editing the part on a page is editing it for all pages or just that one page.
They seem to have removed the custom CSS support, so I lose my security blanket for customizations. Additionally, I am having trouble adding in support for Google fonts. This should absolutely come out of the box by default.
Twentig is a tool I have enjoyed for the previous theme. They said their next version will support Twenty Twenty Two, but I am not sure how long that will take. The main things I would want is a grid view and Google fonts. Again, this is such a big change, I imagine that customization plugins won’t know how to handle it for a while.
As I am using it, I am finding all sorts of hidden areas for customization. It’s a humongous upgrade. The theme doesnt look quite right to me, but I might wait a bit for Twentig before I mess with it more.
To get my Special Elite font in there I had to edit the theme.json file and the style.css file. This is too much for layman to do.
We shall see how it progresses.
Whatya think?