In reply to Elsie G.

I find it almost funny that the idea of creating FSE was to make site editing easier and then we are faced with the reality that any client editing the site with FSE is unthinkable. From the smallest one person business (who would be hopelessly overwhelmed by it) to the largest clients I deal with (around 100 employees). None of them can understand or use FSE. None of them want to! Both client types want a site they can put content into and it conforms to the design constraints I’ve provided.

And for my part? I’ve tried making the sort of flexible dynamic solutions I used to be able to make with PHP and wordpress, and the static templates and theme.json nested hell just makes it fifteen times more complicated for half the impact.

Every 6 months or so I have another try with FSE. I do the whole “build my custom blocks” build steps. I try to wrangle theme.json to present the correct options. I run into roadblocks and roadblocks. Issues which have sat unfixed for 3 years. And I find that I’ve spent 5 days getting a half working shell together.

It’s just not been a good 5 years for WordPress. I no longer recommend it to clients. It’s too complex to support.