I don’t really understand what the Gutenberg teams reasoning behind the whole “full site editing” is. Traditionally themes have worked by giving a template to the user to fill out with content. This was done by separating the content from the presentation, the user handles the content and the theme handles the presentation. This ensures that the user can’t do anything stupid and mess up the site.

I checked the example theme and it seems like it’s a bunch of Gutenberg blocks in a HTML file that the user can edit however they want using the Gutenberg editor. I can’t get the theme working properly on my computer but presumedly these templates will be stored in the database to preserve the changes. This means that the user is able to do whatever they want to mess up the design. Want to delete the title from all blog posts? Delete the site logo? No problem.

Rather than giving the user the possibility to “fill in the blanks” the full site editor seems to try to replicate something like Dreamweaver in the worst possible way, giving free rein to modify the entire site however they see fit.

I have no idea what the Gutenberg team’s vision is in the end. What’s the point of a theme if you can do the same by cobbling a bunch of Gutenberg blocks together? Is it just a bunch of CSS files that maybe change the colours and fonts a bit? And some example templates the user can mess around with?

I get that something like this will work for the casual user to compete with something like Squarespace and Vix but for custom client projects the whole thing is completely unnecessary.

I think Gutenberg, Customizer and “block areas” that replace widgets are good ideas because the theme author ultimately controls how the content appears and they give content editors possibility to edit the site without breaking anything.

Composing the entire site out of Gutenberg blocks seems like a crazy idea to me. I hope the “normal” PHP based themes are not going anywhere soon.