_s VS gutenberg

I tried a lot of themes, in my experience GeneratePress is the fastest, unless you decide to go fully custom and go with _s (but it will be a lot of dev work).

If you've got dev chops in PHP, then Underscores is a good "starter" theme to build your theme off. It looks after a lot of the WP related stuff, letting you focus on the template/HTML/JS/CSS stuff.

Just to add since your new to WordPress and want to save a bunch of time you can use this springboard of a theme that's designed to be turned into what you want and saves hours of time. Underscores

Underscores is likely your best bet.

I would say underscores. I believe it’s by the Automattic team https://underscores.me

I used PHP, JavaScript, and a little bit of Python. I think themes are pretty easy you should try out _s which is a theme template for WordPress and there are similar things for plugins. I learned from this youtube series which is really good -> Wordpress Plugin Developement.

Underscrores or GeneratePress.

I ended up adopting an ITCSS inspired approach as a result of developing wordpress themes with underscores. You can see the current scss structure for starting a project with underscores here.

I built out a documentation site for the insane block markup associated with WordPress's Gutenberg blocks. There was sparse documentation around this, and parsing the WP Block GitHub was ridiculous, especially as someone trying to push production work out into the world.

Gutenberg as part of the core has added modern capabilities for building sites on the frontend. Blocks, a high-level component resembling React’s, are the basic unit to build a webpage’s frontend nowadays. In my opinion, shortcodes, custom fields and metaboxes will soon be a thing of the past, while Gutenberg will probably take over as a full development platform.

Now that we’ve seen how a block works, keep in mind that WordPress Core Blocks function in the same way (but with many more features). If you want to take a look at the source code of the blocks, you can go to the WordPress Repository on GitHub.

For anyone wondering, this is not gutenberg.org, Gutenberg is the name of the Block Editor from WordPress

> The Block Editor project for WordPress and beyond. Plugin is available from the official repository.

https://github.com/WordPress/gutenberg

In this last and specific case I was working with a Laravel application that needs to interact with a WordPress site, and as both works from different Compose projects, I need to add a custom configuration to allow internal requests between them, what get easy to do with Laravel Sail, simply adding a extra_hosts configuration to the docker-compose.yml file but was impossible to do with wp-env and probably will not be implemented as we can see from this Github issue.

The meteoric rise of plugins like Advanced Custom Fields (which is still an excellent plugin and serves it’s purpose very well), and page builder Themes like Divi, was a result of a gap in WordPress’s page editing abilities. And while these things may have been absolutely necessary in the past, with the introduction and integration of Gutenberg into WordPress core, that is no longer the case.

If you are using Gutenberg editor on your WordPress website, simply select the block you would like to create a pattern for, then click the three dots at the top-right corner of the block editor and click "Create reusable block".

Gutenberg is attempting to be a Frontend / UI style site editor (example here: https://wordpress.org/gutenberg ). An amazing example of this type of editor is Webflow. Lesser examples include Square Space and Wix which is what these other plugins, Divi/Elem/Avada/Salient do is provide professional templates that allow users to build from. These push WP from simple blog to an actual website experience. You can think of them, and Webflow imo, kinda like photoshop for websites, or maybe Figma for web development. They allow designers to learn a tool instead of CSS / JS. What I think the WP theme builders really excel at is getting something that looks modern and fast really really quickly. I'm happy to talk about the market and who builds licenses for the WP theme builders but this post would be a book! haha.

Vanilla WP is excellent for beginners who aren't trying to do anything fancy, in fact I think its one of the best things to ever happen to the web. Yes there are exploits etc but that comes with all software. But most other software doesn't run something like 30-40% of the web though so their bugs are really magnified. Same goes for the WP plugin theme builders I mentioned above.