During the week from a hotel room in Madrid I was preparing to change themes to a Full Site Editing (FSE) based theme called Pendant. Don’t ask me why I have chosen this theme over any other because I don’t know myself. It isn’t a hybrid theme, it is fully FSE, and I think it qualifies as a V2 theme because the menus can be changed without using the Customizer. It is also a theme that will be supported by the WordPress Happiness Engineers, an important point for me, as I have no budget.

The experiments installing the Pendant theme on another site went reasonably well, I did this at least twice, and I would have continued except I found limitations trying to do changes from an iPad. I then spent a couple of evenings looking into the blocks that I was likely to use, particularly Group, Row, Column, and the blocks used on a header, Cover, Site Title, Site Logo, Site Tagline and of course Navigation for the menus. I also spent some time on Styles. All good reading but did it make me more prepared? Perhaps a bit.

On Sunday I applied the Pendant theme to the Maximo Secrets website and set about modifying the Header template, from the Template Parts. This was something I learned from the first experiment, changing the header in the Home template would not change the header on other templates.

The Header consisted of a Group with a Row and Cover blocks. In the top Row there were two columns. The first column taking 75% of the width had the Top Menu as a Navigation block, it read in my previous menu and the background colour was changed to a Cyan and the submenu colouring used the same background, all good. The second column had the Social Icons block, three of which were created.

In the Cover block I could add the Site Logo, Site Title, and Site Tagline, and a second menu with magenta background colour, the submenu colour also worked out OK. The good news was that I could get the header to go full width, perhaps it was because I was modifying the Template Part, I really don’t know the reason for this, it was something that failed a couple of weeks ago when I tried.

I now spent a couple of hours fiddling around trying to resolve one issue or another. A lot of time was spent unsuccessfully trying to get a third column added to the top Row block which contained the Navigation and Social Icons, this is where I wanted to add the Search icon the way I had it on my current website. In the end I opted to add the Search block into the Cover area. I had little doubt that these experiments were getting me further and further into a hole, but I kept digging. I then called WordPress.Com support.

The first question to the Happiness Engineer was that the Home page featured images in the blog roll were showing poor quality. This was fixed quickly from the Home template. In the Dimensions setting there was no setting, this was changed to Image Size and clarity was restored.

The second most important question was that when the site was viewed on a mobile phone, the Search block I had added to the Cover caused the rendering to appear off-page on a mobile phone, I had set it too wide. In the display settings, I had set the Width to 600px. I did want to make the space to enter the search text a bit wider, and ideally positioned on the right-hand side of the display rather than adjacent to the Site Title block. I couldn’t find a way to add horizontal space between the Site Title and Search blocks.

The answer which the Happiness Engineer came up with was to add the Site Logo and Site Title blocks to one Row block. Add the Search block to a second Row block. Then, to add a third Row block which contained the first two. I failed with this attempt, but in the end, we got there by creating two columns the first contained the row with the Site Logo and Site Title, the second column just had the Search block. The two were not initially aligned as the Site Logo had more height than the Search block, I did find an answer to this but, I can’t remember exactly how.

The third issue was the display on a mobile phone was showing a menu rather than the hamburger icon that would open the menu. The problem here is that when you change the Overlay Menu to Mobile it renders the submenu in all capital letters which is just awful whether on desktop, tablet, or phone. Yesterday I did get an answer to this, I’m not convinced it will work, but I will try it next weekend and if that doesn’t work then I think I have found a bug.

The fourth issue was that the top menu was much larger in height than the lower menu. The Happiness Engineer, Brittany Gray, found the answer to this, it was padding on the Navigation block and margin was being added by default on the Social Icons block. With those taken out, the two menus were now the same height. But the top menu is a little close to the left-hand edge, more than I would like, but I can live with it for a while. This inconsistent height in the menus was definitely down to some of the digging I had been doing earlier in the afternoon.

I did a little tinkering elsewhere, but it was enough to make me not roll back to the Rowling theme, not yet anyway.

There is still a lot to do, and next weekend is likely to be consumed on this.

• I still want to make the Pages and Posts go full width, I do know how to do this, but will it work when I try this again.
• The Search doesn’t seem to be searching at all. No matter what search you do it still finds 73 pages of results.
• The default fonts are not to my liking, and the heading sizes are out of proportion with the size of the regular text.
• Image captions are too small a font size to be easily read.
• The Home page is showing just four posts.
• I also need to see whether when the hamburger menu is set on a mobile whether I can overcome the submenu being all in capital letters. I’m wondering whether this needs to be corrected for each menu item one at a time.

Next weekend I should know whether I am fully on an FSE theme or whether I will be rolling back. The lack of search may be a reason for rolling back, and if I can’t sort out the issue on a mobile phone then that might be another reason for returning to the Rowling theme.

So, what do I think of Full Site Editing? It is a learning curve. To try and do this without the assistance of the Happiness Engineers is not something I would recommend, which may rule this out for many as you need to be on Premium to get Live Chat Support which I have found to be excellent. There are a few tricks to learn to get things lined up. You may not be able to position things exactly the way you want them without resorting to code, as you are adding blocks together in combination, so it depends how those blocks combine. FSE is still in Beta, OK six months on, but I am sure not all bugs have been found yet, and not all bugs have been fixed. What you end up with may be a compromise, but then a classic theme is a compromise of sorts.

Is going to Full Site Editing worth it? Yes, I think so, I needed to change themes anyway to be able to go full width and I haven’t yet tried to improve the website, for the last several years I have been building content. The way I looked at it was if I found a Classic theme that was full width, and then I started to build out a Home Page or make use of the footer rather than the widgets area to the right of the screen, or if I was using widgets or plugins, perhaps I would be making it harder and harder for me to eventually move to an FSE based theme, so try and take the plunge now.

The objectives for Week 43 are simple:

• Get myself fully on to FSE or rollback to Rowling.
• As I was on holiday last week, I am one week behind with the videos, so I need to complete two videos and their podcast episodes.

There won’t be time for anything else, although I must buy those lights, it is getting too dark to do green screen recording.