New Terms in the WordPress Site Editor

I’m finally getting up-to-speed with modern WordPress. Most of my WordPress work has been plugin development, and I’ve tended to reach for Elementor for frontend work. But as I think about how I want to continue to work with WordPress, especially in teaching others to use the software, I want to rely on what is built in.

Here are the new terms I’ve encountered so far.

Site Editor

This is the big one. Seemingly an evolution of the old “Customizer”, this interface exists somewhere between the Dashboard and the frontend. It reminds me of Divi, in that this experience van be accessed while viewing any page. It also reminds me of Elementor in other ways.

There are many levels to click into to access, configure, and edit the following components (component is not a Site Editor-specific term here)

Templates

I remember these from old WordPress. The PHP files in the theme that display different content types.

But now, they’re .html files and contain very little html.

Template Parts

I see “Areas” in the editor, and “parts” in the theme folder. I may be incorrect that these are related, but there are currently 4 of each, and a header and footer in common.

Patterns

Patterns are reusable chunks of content. If you have a “Contact Me” or “Join Newsletter” section you want to be able to reuse across multiple pages, a pattern is a way of making this content reusable.

Styles

Groups of design elements are collected as Styles. They can be so diverse as to look like different themes, using different typography, fonts, colors, spacing, etc. Changing styles gives you a nice view of a style guide that completely adapts to your selection. This gives a nice representation of the impact of your choice across the site.

You can edit styles, but it looks like you can’t yet create a new one without adding a file to the theme.

One thing I was specifically hoping to be able to edit within styles is the default margins of specific headings, like <h3>.

Palettes

I’m unclear how a Palette is different from a Style. Choosing a Palette has the same effect as choosing a style. Perhaps they are styles that only allow grayscale.