Design, Development, and One Cool Tool

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Written By Daniel Schutzsmith

2 thoughts on “Design, Development, and One Cool Tool”

  1. “This looks like a terrific shift to continue making it easier for developers and designers to ensure their stylistic vision can be followed in custom themes.”

    Yes, terrific! Because what graphic designer or casual user doesn’t already know how to open, write, and debug a json file when they want to format their site?

    Even Matt is (rightly!) concerned that implementing even a dirt-simple new design for WordPress.org would be faster and easier with #!%! Wix than with blocks. Requiring average graphic designers to first learn json (and SSH or SFTP so they can access their theme.json file in the first place) is probably not going to improve that perception.

    • Hey David, I totally get the frustration and skepticism. Currently, there is no master way to see all of the styles that all core blocks provide either, so this is a step in the right direction to make that more possible.

      Now, what the “terrific” part is: as I alluded, there are several different developers right now working on export tools from Figma that would create this theme.json file. So imagine as a designer never having to actually go into the theme.json but rather, all you are doing is updating the Figma file with the appropriate styles. Then that theme.json that is exported goes directly into a git repo, version controlled for the developers to take a look at and work with.

      THIS is what we’ve been looking for in the design world since the web began. I’m speaking from experience here as a web designer and a web developer. This would truly change the game and make it possible to have a design led by designers and the build led by the developers. Coming together in the middle at the theme.json.

      Also, there are several more folks working on theme.json generators that could do the same kind of thing from a standalone web app.

      Lastly, with full site editing, the vision is that all of this can be done inside of wp-admin by a designer. No need to do any coding at all.

      Are these things ready now? No. None of us have said they are. Are they coming soon? I believe we will be able to do this kind of process before the end of 2023. Marking my calendar to come back here this date next year to comment whether the prediction was right.

      Cheers!

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