Last week I moved to a Full Site Editing (FSE) theme, Pendant. My objective for this week was either sort out some of the issues or roll back to the Rowling theme. The former would be considered success, I don’t even want to consider rolling back, but a disaster springs to mind if that is the case. The outcome then, a lot happened this week!

The week started by addressing the issue with the Home page showing just four posts. The Query Loop Block had settings in the toolbar, and one of these was quickly changed to show 30 posts. I then changed the display to show three columns instead of two. But with 300 posts I really wanted to be able to display all of them if someone wanted to scroll through to see what I had written about

The online help suggested there was a pagination block, and I found it, but where do I place it? I decided to place it inside the Query Loop, at the next level down, below the Group block that holds the Post Template block. I was right, and a user can now scroll away. It was kind of handy, because I noticed that for a lot of my earlier posts, I didn’t have a Featured Image, this was because the top of the post displayed the same image. I also know that until this year I had never written an Excerpt. This is two items to add to the long list of Things To Do.

The next most important issue to fix was that the Search block was not searching, or rather it just found all posts and not a filtered set. Over to the Happiness Engineers in WordPress Support again, this time Chris.

In the Query Loop Block there is a setting ‘Inherit query from template’ which was toggled on. If it is switched off, you can set the Post Type. Chris got it working, and I tested it OK. But I’ve tried switching this back and forth and the search always works the way you would expect it, I couldn’t get it to not filter at all. My guess is that this only happens when you first change to a FSE based theme from a non-FSE based theme, the setting is probably set to null, which is neither 0 (off) or 1 (on). The user interface can’t show a toggle for null, so it appears to be switched on, when it is neither switched on or off, i.e., there is no filtering.

Either way I’m happy, I have the search working, without it it might have risked me returning to the Rowling theme. I did ask Chris what the logic was behind the search, and he provided a link https://wordpress.com/support/wordpress-editor/blocks/search-block/#what-it-searches

What this tells me is that it searches titles and body text, and image captions and alt text, but not categories or tags, which is a pity, but good to know as I will need to find a way of providing a search by category as I have now taken out the sidebar which previously provided this. Better also add that to the list of Things To Do.

I was on a roll, and it was only Thursday evening, so I set about trying to scrub away the main element of the Pendant theme, my dislike for the fonts and heading sizes used. I had previously wanted to go for the Blockbase theme which I liked because the text seemed so easy to read, and I have a lot of text, and people who read it, are supposed to be trying to learn from it, and they need to be concentrating to get the most out of the text. But I had steered away from Blockbase because it was a universal theme, and not pure FSE.

I downloaded the theme to my play pit website, and I instantly liked it. However, the text was set to System Font and when I changed this on the Maximo Secrets website it was not the same, so I don’t exactly know what this means, I presume it is the themes default.

In the Global Styles I set about looking for a font that looked something like the one used for Blockbase. There were certain letters I began to focus on, g, t, l, k and w. I wrote out the alphabet and numbers to make this easier and I copied some real text from my Maximo Secrets website to the play pit site so that a comparison could be made. I eventually came upon the font Inter which is what I settled on. Under Typography I changed the Text, Links and Headings, all of them down to Heading Level 4 to Inter.

The next step, under Colors I changed the Palette using the Hex values (e.g., 007CBA), and then changed the colour for the Elements so that the Links, Headings and Buttons will now be in the blue used by Blockbase. All much better. I can’t say that it is perfect in my eyes, but it is a lot better than it was a few hours ago, a successful evening.

Friday came, another evening of tinkering with the website templates. First up was trying to make the Post template to go full width, this was the Single template, but I guess it might be called something else on another theme. The top Group block’s Content and Wide settings were both changed to 2000, these settings are only available when the Layout section’s – Inner blocks use content width – is set. This was successful in making the featured image stretch the full width of my laptop with just a little bit of white space on the left and right margins, it also looked fine on my iPad and iPhone. So, I then did the same to the Post Content block and checked across the three devices – all great, tick in the box for that one. This makes a massive difference as it makes images nearly four times larger on desktop and iPad when compared with the previous Rowling theme, this was the main reason for wanting to change themes.

As I was checking several posts and pages across the site on various devices, I noticed that some of the searches showed featured images that were not as clear as others. It seemed to only be associated with the posts I had loaded since I started to try and move to an FSE based theme, I later tracked it down to the last five posts apart from the one I had added this week. These posts coincided with the period when I first started to move to a FSE based theme, coincidence, or not.

I was back on to the Happiness Engineers sort of explaining to them the problem and I had had something similar a few weeks previously, but I couldn’t find the chat transcript, but eventually it came back to me. I remember that a setting was made on the Home template so that it was full size, or something like that and the other settings were medium, large and a fourth, which I later found out to be thumbnail. These settings are in the Post Featured Image block, there is an Image Size which I found to be set to Full Size, I suspected another of these quirks when moving to FSE. I changed it to Large, saved, checked the images, reloaded the template, changed the Image Size back to Full Size and saved, now everything was working OK.

A little later I noticed that the featured image for these five posts was also low-quality images, ha, same problem I thought, perhaps not. The problem here was that you do not have the Image Size setting on the Single template which is used by my posts. Back then to the Happiness Engineers. Another set of tinkering and we concluded that the best thing to do was to delete the images from the Media Library and reload them. So, I set about doing this and for the first one it worked, but as I was checking the post, I noticed that the images were not full width, the text was, but the images were finishing two-thirds across the page.

A bit of discovery work showed that for 290 posts the images were full width, but only the last 6 weeks, the same five with the image problem and the one I had loaded during the week, were showing a smaller size of image. It was back to the Happiness Engineers again and I found our Tanya from the WordPress Courses Community doing her duty on the Support Desk.

The image size problem was quickly sorted out. For each image the Image Size was set to Large, it needed to be set to Full Size. I did a couple of tests, and this was OK, it shouldn’t take more than 30 minutes to correct all six posts, something for tomorrow. For all my other 290 posts the image setting was an exact size of 1920 x 1080, rather than providing the option for Thumbnail Medium, Large, or Full Size. It is something that I will need to do when loading up images in the future, set them to Full Size. This issue has only become a problem since moving to full width.

While I had Tanya on the Chat, I told her about my other problem with the poor-quality images and she tried to discover the root cause. We worked our way through the last remaining posts trying to do different things, but in the end the only thing that worked was to reload the image to the Media Library, root cause will remain unknown. But thank you Tanya for trying.

Saturday and more tinkering. First up fix those 6 posts where the image size was set to Large and change them to Full Size – job done. The next job on the list was the last two Posts were to be on a new sub menu under YouTube Channel in the top menu. I used to amend menus via the customizer, now where? Quickly solved by going to the Header Template Part and drilling down below the Navigation block where there were a series of Submenu blocks and below that Page Link blocks. I created a new one using Duplicate and then in the Link on the toolbar it was just the same as changing any other link. I noticed that the Podcast submenu was not in the right order, easily fixed – job done.

Next up was setting the size of Post titles which seemed to be no larger than the internal headings H2. Under Typography I had set H1 to be larger than H2, and I thought H1 was used for Titles, the issue must be somewhere else, and it was. When I looked at the Single template the Post Title block was set to H2, I reset this to H1 – that’s better.

Image Captions were a bit too small; I couldn’t find any way to change the size, although you can change the font colour, capitalise, underscore, etc, this would need to be done for each image which would be a bore. So back to the Happiness Engineers and in less than 5 minutes the change had been made for the Embedded YouTube block as well. Achieved by changing the Additional CSS under Appearance so that the block-image and block-embed were both set to 20px. Of course, this is a universal setting, great on desktop, OK on iPad, but on iPhone it is too large, oh well, never mind.

Last week I had an issue with submenus showing in capital letters when the Navigation block Overlay setting was set to Mobile which provides a button that looks like a hamburger on a mobile device, which takes up a lot less space than a menu with several items, especially two menus with several items. Anyway, I didn’t want the menu in capitals and so I turned off the overlay. Now I needed to fix this. It had been suggested to me that you could set the Typography for each menu item.

With Overlay switched back on I set about trying to change each menu item to set it to be Capitalised. All good, but if the menu had a submenu, you had no control over this as for the Submenu block there are no Typography settings. Back to the Happiness Engineers for this one too. The result was more code to add to the Additional CSS, looks like this is the workaround for a known issue.

The other issue I had with the menus was that the font for the main menu and the submenu items was not the same. Evidently, they were all using the new font Inter, but there was obviously something going wrong. A couple of extra lines to the Additional CSS fixed this, to set letter spacing and the font weight. After coming off the chat with the Happiness Engineer I did play with this a bit by removing the letter spacing or by changing the font weight. The values provided were set to keep the menu and submenu consistent, because if you changed anything they became inconsistent. Full Site Editing does show still under Beta, and these must be some of those teething issues. The menu consistency is better than inconsistency even if the letter spacing and font weight is a tad more than I would have set. As for the mobile experience, it is all a lot better than it was, the heading is far from perfect, but I think I’m going to have to live with that.

That was all the issues I had wanted to correct from last weekend, and it is still only Saturday. I have at least concluded I’m on a FSE based theme and there is now no turning back.

Next up I made a small change to the Search template to make the text larger and to add a magenta colour to the Search button. I found I could also make the text larger in the Search block that I had added to the Site Banner. I added some help text below the search bar to explain how the results would be presented and to give an example for a phrase-based search.

After going full width, the next most important large topic item I had on my list was to rethink categories and tags. I don’t use tags currently and my category list is getting a little long, I do have three tags from a long time ago, but it would take me only a minute to delete those.

I tend to write articles in blocks of posts on a particular subject, and then I either get to the end, or get bored, and then move on to the next subject. When I was thinking about a static home page, I was thinking that these article groups should be featured. The starting point is to make each article group easy to find either with a category search or a tag search. Note I am trying to avoid the use of post, page, or portfolio, because I think there might be some rethink on that subject as well. There is another reason for rethinking this. In the New Year I plan to start reworking all my articles to bring them up to date with the latest screenshots from the Maximo software and to introduce improvements with respect to SEO, so I need a structured way to approach this.

I set about adding the Categories List block and Tag Cloud block to the Search template. It doesn’t look pretty, but it is functional and hopefully I can improve its look later. When either of these is used it pulled up the Archive template, so this needed a bit of rework as well, a similar exercise to what I did on the Home template which shows the blog roll.

Now to deciding how to use Categories and Tags. A little research first. I found out that Categories can be hierarchical, Tags not. The Query Loop Block, Blog Post Block and Post Carousel Block all use Categories and Tags. The Latest Posts block only has Categories, which is a pity because I use this currently for some grouping of posts and I thought the article grouping might be achieved by a tag, now I’m thinking it must be a category, which means that I might be moving most of my categories over to tags, I wondered whether there is a method of doing this?

After checking with the Happiness Engineer, they confirmed what I found from the Support site. Latest Posts block is Categories only, and there is no method for converting categories to tags, except manually. So, next step was to use a spreadsheet to try and work out how I wanted Categories and Tags to work.

During the length of time of the Isaac Hayes “Shaft” album I listed my current categories and number of posts, then I used my recently assembled Home page to work back through my posts counting the number of articles that fell into each article group. The two figures didn’t quite align, never mind. I also listed what else I had written about which were on Pages and Portfolios. Now I had to think how my audience would want to find my articles.

Maximo has several modules and additional products. Within the modules there are applications. Application level feels too granular, a quick look on my System which only has Maximo and three other products installed shows 267 applications, with all products installed I would suspect it would be over 400. Each Industry Solution and Add On Product is a large grouping of functionality, and while there are many modules some of those modules would never create much content, others would have tons of content, so my initial thoughts are don’t try to make Categories or Tags fit the modules or applications of Maximo which is how I started out, but consider a smaller number of Categories (or Tags) around the Products and the main areas of Maximo even if they were covered by multiple modules.

Next CD is Led Zeppelin II. I’ve decided that if I have a category with only a couple of posts, I don’t need it, so I’m thinking of doing some pruning, on the spreadsheet that is. As I was doing this, I came to the way that I categorise the Podcasts and YouTube Videos these are already broad categories, so why not use those. This makes sense it would mean that I have the same categories for Podcasts, YouTube, and Articles, and if I moved into Learning Management it is highly likely each set of lessons and quizzes would follow the same categories. For example, my idea was to have a category of Asset Management with tags for YouTube, Bite Size (the name of the Podcast), Articles, Lessons, and Quizzes.

It sounded like a good plan; however, I need to group a set of posts. I currently use the Latest Posts block for the set of Asset Management Podcasts and another for the Asset Management YouTube videos, which means if I only have Asset Management as a category how would I split out podcasts, videos, and articles, it is a great pity that the Latest Posts block doesn’t also include a Tag attribute. I’ll have to see if I can achieve the same thing with a different type of block.

While I had my own ideas it was back to the Happiness Engineers for some back-up suggestions. They confirmed that the Latest Posts block wouldn’t be able to handle the use of a tag. They provided a link that gave some other ideas – https://wordpress.com/support/posts/show-your-posts-in-chronological-order/ and one using Short Codes https://wordpress.com/support/display-posts-shortcode/

The idea I had was that the Blog Post Block gives you the ability to Choose Specific Posts. I tried this on a new page, and it seemed to work so I deleted or renamed my current five categories for YouTube videos and Podcasts, added a tag for YouTube and another for Bite Size (the name of the podcast), and set about changing 50+ posts with the correct category and tag.

When I came to use the Choose Specific Posts and started filtering by the name of the post in the order I wanted to add them, I realised the problem which resulted me in reversing everything I had just done. Two hours later I was back to where I had been.

The issue I faced was that the Post Title for the Podcast episode and the YouTube post are identical, they cover similar ground, they are separated currently by category. No matter what I tried I couldn’t pick the one associated with the YouTube video, it was always picking the post associated with the Podcast, the one with the earlier date. So, for this to work I would have to change the Post title for all the YouTube posts, which is not something I want to do, certainly not to just try and get sorting to work.

What I want to achieve is one Category called Asset Management, but with tags to separate the type of content YouTube, Bite Size (Podcast), or Article. So, I need a block that looks like Latest Posts where I can show image to the left and Excerpt to the right where I can pick the Category and Tag and display them in an order from oldest to newest, the order I write the posts. At this point I decided to reach out to the WordPress courses team with a comment titled “I have a Problem”.

It has been a good week. I should have stopped when I was ahead instead of finishing not knowing how to proceed on the next step. This will now be bugging me with a full week of work ahead, and little time to continue tinkering until towards the end of the week.

At the beginning of the week, I was one video behind, the week when I was on holiday in Madrid. I did get finished one YouTube video on Thursday, it was long one, the longest at nearly 30 minutes, and I got most of the way through preparing for next week’s video which hopefully I might publish on Tuesday. This means that I might have caught up by the end of the week. But I am getting behind on the podcast episodes, although these really don’t take long to produce, with the words written I can push through four in a day.

My objectives for week 44 will be:

• Publish two YouTube videos so that I have caught up
• Check out and order the studio lighting I will need for the winter months (this is getting serious now)
• Continue to rework Categories and Tags
• Find an answer to which type of block will present a set of posts in chronological order using both a category and tag
• Install the Sensei plugin for Learning Management
• Start use the Lavalier microphone and Power Director 365

On a final note I did reward myself with ordering a new iPhone 14 Pro Max, a new toy for the videos, I’ll have to wait a few weeks though.