We‘ve been recommending Anders Norén’s themes for years. In 2019 the default theme Twenty Twenty was built upon his theme Chaplin, and this default theme (with the plugin Twentig) marked the transition to working with blocks for me. We‘ve been in touch on social media back then, but lately lost contact. Last thing I remember was his theme Tove as one of the first real block themes. A lot has happened since then. Time to catch up (or read the German translation):
Hi Anders, we‘re very happy you agreed to do this interview! Let us know what you‘ve been up to and what happened since Chaplin and Tove.
Happy to be interviewed! It’s been an eventful few years, both personally and professionally. For the last two years or so, I’ve worked almost exclusively as a contractor for the Special Projects team at Automattic, designing and building stuff both internally and for external partners together with a ton of talented folks. One of those people is Christy Nyiri, who got up on stage at WordCamp US to talk a bit about what the Special Projects team has worked on. I definitely recommend you give it a watch.
Personally, it’s been just about a year since me and my partner Rebecka moved from Stockholm to Vemdalen, a town of 600 people located in the most sparsely populated province in Sweden, close to the Swedish-Norwegian mountains. Short of meeting Rebecka (and maybe discovering WordPress), I think the move is the best thing to have happened to me. I grew up in a small town and didn’t realize how much I missed living in one until we finally decided to leave Stockholm behind. Now, we live a ten minute drive from the tree line and have snow on the ground for most of the year. As much as I miss the restaurants and cafes, I can’t see myself living in a city ever again.
Outside of work, I try to spend as much time as possible in nature. Last year, I took a two month sabbatical from computer screens to hike the entire Swedish mountain chain, and I hope to repeat that trip on skis in the coming years. I’ve also continued to release free block themes, the latest being Pulitzer, but I don’t spend quite as much time on it as I used to. My most recent community project is as projectionist at the local community-run movie theater.
On the theme page of your website you write „My themes are fast, carefully crafted, and open source. Just like WordPress itself.“ What is it that you like about WordPress and what do you think about project Gutenberg?
The flexibility of it. You can extend, modify or entirely fork WordPress however you want, and everything else that I love about it – the community most of all – has grown from there. I set up my first self-hosted WordPress install because I wanted to modify the theme I had been using on WordPress.com (half a lifetime ago, back in 2007), and registered an account on the WordPress.org forums because I needed help with some PHP.
As for Gutenberg, it had a really rocky start but continues to improve with leaps and bounds for every year that passes. For all the grumbling in the community when WordPress 5.0 was released, it’s impossible to imagine what WordPress would look like today if it still shipped with what we now call the classic editor.
You‘ve developed quite a few block themes since Tove. What have you learned since then and how have your themes evolved with it?
New technical features aside, I think the most important thing I’ve learned is what type of themes I want to be building. My early block themes like Tove and Poe tried to be one-size-fits-all themes with lots of patterns covering many different use cases, but as time has gone on, I’ve gravitated more towards smaller, more niche themes. My Linktree-esque theme Oaknut is a good example. Fun to build, easy to support.
Those looking for more extensive themes have plenty of great premium themes to choose from, including Ollie and Rockbase, but I usually just recommend Twenty Twenty-Four. You can make a strong argument that it’s the best default WordPress theme ever, and Twenty Twenty-Five is shaping up to be a fine successor.
Mike McAlister from Ollie WP said that patterns are the thing that sets block themes apart. Would you agree with the importance of patterns for the personality of a block theme?
Definitely. I hope further work on the official Block Pattern Directory can reduce the need for each theme to include custom patterns for more common layouts, but carefully crafted custom patterns will always be a great way for a theme to stand out from the crowd. The tricky thing about patterns on the directory is that the ones that look the most striking when viewed in isolation, with flashy colors and dramatic typography, likely won’t match the aesthetic of the theme you’re currently using.
Another wrinkle is that there isn’t a standardized naming scheme for spacing, typography and color variables in block themes, which means that a pattern built for one theme can look quite different when imported into another. The really striking patterns I talked about above solve this by including style settings for the blocks in the pattern markup, but that has problems of its own. Imagine adding five different patterns from the pattern directory to your site, each of which includes buttons with custom styles embedded directly in the block markup. That’s five patterns that all have buttons that look different, and none of them look like the button styles you’ve set in the Site Editor. Having to go through every pattern added from the pattern directory to reset the block styles isn’t a great experience.
It’s a tricky problem to solve, because the pattern directory only including patterns generic enough to work in any theme won’t make anyone happy. For now, theme creators that include bespoke block patterns in their themes have a huge advantage.
Thinking full site editing through, one basic theme would be enough because a block theme is little more than a default configuration file for the Site Editor that can be changed by the user. Do you think themes are here to stay at all?
Oh yes. Give users the choice between A) a blank slate to modify and B) a finished design with layouts that solve their problems and an aesthetic that speaks to them, and I think nine out of ten will go for option B. I think that will always be the case, regardless of how user-friendly we make the tools. Themes will continue to become smaller and faster to create, but even if they end up being a single theme.json file specifying colors, typography and layout, most people would still rather pick a starting point that speaks to them rather than creating one from scratch. Theme developers aren’t going anywhere anytime soon.
(Maybe I’m just coping. I like my job!)
You still have your classic themes (you call them legacy themes) listed on your website. How difficult is it to keep them up to date with the new WordPress and how long do you think classic themes will still be supported in general?
Funny thing is, the classic themes are actually easier to maintain than the block themes, since they have been pretty much frozen in time since the introduction of block themes. I’ve had to make some minor compatibility updates for new PHP releases, but other than that, I’ve barely touched them since I updated them to support the block-based content editor six years ago.
Keeping the block themes up to date has been more of a hassle due to changes big and small in each WordPress release, but the number of breaking changes have gone down steadily in the last couple of releases, which I’m grateful for.
I’m guessing the Classic Editor will cease to be officially maintained pretty soon, but I think classic PHP-based themes will be around for a long, long time to come. It’ll be years before there are as many sites running block themes as there are running classic themes, and even when we reach that point, I doubt the powers that be will decide to deprecate one fifth of all of the sites on the web (based on the current ~40% WordPress market share).
At least in Germany there are still many people who refuse to acknowledge the advantages of blocks, not to mention block themes or full site editing. They prefer to stick to classic themes and page builders instead. How can they be convinced to change their mind?
At the risk of going overboard with preaching the theme gospel… Most people just pick the theme they like, and use whatever page builder/site editor the theme requires them to. For a long time, there just weren’t a lot of block themes to choose from, which meant that most block theme users were early adopters willing to put up with the quirks and bugs (many, many bugs) of the early site editor days. I completely understand those who were put off by the rocky start and are reluctant to give block themes another try, but I hope the steady stream of quality block themes both free and commercial will lure them back in.
The agency folks will be a tougher nut to crack, but I think it’s only a question of time before they come around as well. Blocks are the future of WordPress.
Anything else you’d like to tell us and our readers?
One of my favorite accounts on the hellsite formerly known as Twitter is that of designer and former WordPress theme developer Orman Clark, who shares profound design tips such as “design tip: take a break” and “design tip: eat a banana”.
Here’s mine:
design tip: sleep outside for a night
It can change your life.
Photos: Andres Norén
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