How Blocks, Themes and Page Builders Work Together in WordPress

Bob: I’m here with Nathan from WP Builds. Nathan, welcome to Woo Bits.

Nathan: Thank you very much for having me. I really appreciate you taking the time to chat to me.

Bob: Yeah, I think I like this Friday show I’m doing now because I can bring somebody in on the same level as a co-host and we just don’t do an interview. We can do a actual discussion around something and I usually come up with something that I’ve thought about or seen on the internet. And this time what happened, let me give you a little bit of background. So I was rebranding BobWP and I had this grandeur idea of, “Well, I’m going to put in the 2023 theme and I’m just going to explore and learn everything about Blocks and the editor.” I had all these thoughts. I wrote this post about it and it just sat there as a really ugly little bare-boned blog for about two months.

And finally I thought, “Well, I really need to brand this. I really don’t have time to do this.” So I popped in the back because I’m hosting with Nexcess, they had Kadence, the theme, already installed, and I thought, “Hmm, I’ve used that before.” So I went and looked at their, I can’t remember what it’s called, but essentially, their templates or starter templates, they call them. And I breezed through those back and forth a few times. I saw this one called Influencer. They always have to name something. And I thought, “Well, I could just pop in this, get rid of that part, pop in this, get rid of that part.” And so I did. I loaded it in and within a day I had my homepage all done, which is primarily the biggest part of it. There’s going to be a lot of other pages.

So I pondered there for a moment and I thought, “Oh my God, I’m a regular WordPress user.” I felt like I was suddenly that person that just said, “I don’t want to learn all this. I don’t want to even mess with it. I just want something in there and go for it.” And that’s what I did. And I thought it would be great to talk about this you’re involved with. I mean, you have your favorites in the building area as far as using Blocks or Page Builders, all that stuff. So you probably have heard this story a lot and you talk to a lot of people that are building these products. What’s your initial thought? Have you said, “Okay, I saw Bob do this.” And, “Oh yeah, that’s Bob,” or something. Or if you see somebody say that, which you’ve probably seen a lot of times, where do you see that pain point? I mean, I was thinking about that there’s that pain point and the solutions out there.

Nathan: It’s interesting because just before we hit record, you mentioned that you’d thought that you might try this with the WordPress site editor, aka the built in capabilities in a vanilla install of WordPress to do headers and footers and template parts and all that kind of stuff. And I think for most people, that’s a really tricky proposition still. Although they’ve made recent moves to make the navigation a lot easier and they’ve tabbed the interface so that it’s a little bit easier to use, I still think that’s really difficult. And so, it’s quite beguiling isn’t it, to go down the route of something that you’re familiar with in your case, Kadence. So Kadence was in there and it comes along with its templates, and the templates are yelling at you from the UI because there’s a nice button at the top of the Block editor, which is saying, I can’t remember what it says, is it starter templates or something like that?

Bob: Basically, yeah.

Nathan: Yeah, and you click that and the model pops up and all of a sudden you’re presented with dozens and dozens of different options. And you know what? I think if you are building websites for clients and you’re charging a pretty penny for it, perhaps you need to go a little bit further than that and make it a bit more bespoke and a bit more unique. But in your case, it sounds like, from what you were saying, that you wanted this out the door within a day and you didn’t want to spend the time learning anything new. Those solutions feel like a really neat way of getting things done because all you do is really click a button, in comes everything that you need, and then it’s really a process of going through the settings for each of the Blocks. So I don’t know, I’ve got an image over here, but I don’t like the way it looks, the opacities wrong, or I want to add a bit of a board of radius on it or something like that.

You go fiddle with it and it gets you 90% of… Well, maybe more like 60%, 70% of where you want to do with the click of a button, which is pretty remarkable. I don’t have any pride in saying, “No, that’s not the way to do it.” To me, that just seems eminently sensible. If the tools are there and it fits for your purpose, then why not use it? Same for any page builder. I think they all come with their own template packs and things like that. So yeah, I think it’s a really affordable way of doing things. And the mission of WordPress is to democratize publishing that underlies everything. So these things do make it a lot easier. There’s obviously tweaks to be done. In terms of optimization, there’s probably things that you could do, SEO, image optimization, probably things that are in the HTML that don’t need to be there that you might need to pull out. But generally speaking, if it looks fine, that’s probably most of what you want. I should mention accessibility as well, but that’s a whole other story.

Bob: That was one of the things. And fortunately, I do have enough knowledge where I go in, I’m a little bit more comfortable at poking around at things. And there was one part that I couldn’t get to work, and I actually struggled with it for about an hour, and was even having troubles, and I think there was just, I don’t know if it was some little bug or whatever, but overall, it was with an attitude of, I just need to get this up and going. It’s not rocket science. I don’t need a lot behind the scenes. Everything that I need I can do, but I wanted to look better because I found my design skills really have diminished over the years since I’m not doing them anymore. And when I think I have this idea in my head and I try to put it together, it looks basically like crap.

So those starter template, for me, when I’m doing something for myself, Do the Woo, I had another company do that, and they suggested I put in a certain theme and a certain page builder that would work to get where I wanted to go. And I was like, “Yeah, let’s do it.” And of course, I had to revisit that with Beaver Builder and I had to get in there and relearn that because it had been a while. But with everything that’s going on, I’d love to hear your personal opinion because I feel like they’re not going away anytime soon because that would just be too huge of a transformation. What’s your feel with everything that’s going on with the themes and Page Builders and Blocks, the mesh of it all?

Nathan: I feel there’s a whole swell of people who have decided that they’re going to transition over to Blocks. So it rather than install a Page Builder, be that a theme or a plugin, they’ve decided that they’re going to install a Block Suite say, or a theme which maybe behaves well with a particular Block Suite. So you mentioned Kadence, and obviously their theme is designed and their Block Suite, Kadence Blocks works well with that. But then you’ve also got Generate Press, which is a theme and Generate Blocks, which is a suite of blocks and you could put Stackable in there and there’s a whole ton of other ones as well. I feel there’s a whole bunch of people who are now experimenting with Blocks and enjoying it, but I don’t really see the interest in what we might call a, goodness, a classic page builder.

It seems like if we’d had that conversation five years ago, the word classic in front of page builder just would seem sacrilegious, but a classic page builder. So I think the Elementor crowd are still using Elementor, the Beaver Builder crowd are still using Beaver Builder. You’ve got some new incumbents, things like Breakdance, and there’s things like Bricks and various other ones, and there’s some ones that don’t seem to have quite the popularity, Oxygen and what have you. And then there’s the one that I don’t seem to mention too much, but seems to be used quite a lot, Divi. There’s loads of them and they seem to be really popular tools still.

And whilst in the WordPress space, and by that I mean the people that I’m often talking to, there seems to be a groundswell of interest in Blocks. I don’t see any sense of Page Builders usage or interest in Page Builders diminishing. I mean, I’m signed up to almost every newsletter in the WordPress space that you can be signed up to and constant iterations on the products. I get updates about roadmap items and features that have just been built in all of these page builders. They seem to be very profitable and doing rather well, so my sense is that Page Builders will keep going.

And if you’re coming from a service like, I don’t know, let’s say you’re on something like Squarespace, you are really familiar with that paradigm. You’ve got a panel of modules that you can drop in and those modules achieve certain objectives and image left text. This is a gallery and this is a set of posts that are connected to your blog. All of those things. It seems, it’s just too straightforward a thing. I mean, maybe something will come along which will challenge their dominance, but I don’t see it anytime soon. But it feels like it’s a subset of people at the moment who are pushing into Blocks and only using Blocks. But I don’t know, maybe I’ve got the sense of that wrong.

Bob: Yeah, I mean, we have Builders on here, but Builders deal with a lot of people that have done their own sites or people that want to do their own sites or think they can do their own sites. I mean, I was in that situation. I was trying to put my feet in the shoes of a basic user thinking, “I went this route and am I just thinking ease like a more basic user might think?” And saw that, “Ooh, Kadence, it’s right here. Why don’t I check this out? Maybe this is the solution I need.” And I opened up, like you said, those starter templates and I go, “Ooh, pretty. This looks a lot better than I’ve done so far.”

Nathan: Yeah, as you were talking there, having a thought about how WordPress might have changed over the last six or seven years, and it occurs to me that if you’d have gone back into the, I don’t know, 2015 or something like that, we were surrounded by conversations around almost the page builders were heretical. This isn’t the WordPress way of doing things. We must fiddle with template files. And it’s important to get your idea out and write lines of code and the CSS must be done manually. And it really does feel like that argument has evaporated. I never see that conversation anymore. And in fact, I see a lot of heavyweight coders who are clearly using page builders because the enterprise, in most cases, is just to get the job done as quickly as possible, really. I mean, obviously there’s more considerations than that. You want it to look nice and so on and so forth.

But if you could have every single thing equal, but you could reduce the time, then that’s a bit of a no-brainer. Reducing the time is exactly what page builders are about. They’ve got all these whizbang settings as well, which allow you to do multiple things. But I think that argument has gone away. I struggled, to be honest with you, getting them in front of clients. I always found there were more errors being made with page builders because you get muscle memory, don’t you? If you use a particular, I don’t know, let’s say in your case, Kadence Blocks, after a period of time doing it, you will know where all the settings are and you won’t have to think, you’ll just click buttons and expand accordion menus and what have you. And it will be exactly where you’re anticipating it being, and you’ll know what the result of everything that you do is immediately.

But I always found the enterprise of trying to impart that knowledge to clients was almost impossible given the constraints. In fact, I remember there were all sorts of projects where people would release videos, educating people on particular page builders, and those projects, I think, ultimately, always failed because the page builders would change so rapidly that any video tutorial which was created would very quickly become out of date because they’d move settings from this panel to another panel and so on and so forth. But I just really struggled to make clients aware of them. But for me, the one that I used right from the outset was Beaver Builder. And I mean, I wouldn’t say I was an expert with it, but I certainly knew where everything was, and I could whip up a page that mimicked almost any other page that you could find on the internet in a matter of minutes, because I didn’t have to think it was just instinctive like driving a car. You do it long enough and you’re no longer processing what you’re doing.

And I think for that, they’re brilliant. I do feel for the people who are trying to use the site editor though, because the core version of, if you like a page builder, because that’s in flock so much at the moment, and it’s changing given the requirements of the community and the way that the project is evolving, but it feels like it’s changing so much that it’s really difficult. And I think a few things were launched in a way that made them quite hard to figure out. The Navigation Block is a particular one. I mean, it’s significantly improved in recent endeavors, but when it first came out, I took a look at it and thought, “I don’t know what I’m doing here. What was wrong with the menu item that we had in the admin previously?” So I don’t know whether I would want to let clients loose on Gutenberg and site editing at the moment.

Bob: It’s interesting what you said about the muscle memory and stuff. So it’s been, what? About two and a half years ago when I had Do the Woo redone and the agency I hired, they were looking at it and they came back and said, “What we’d like to do, based on what your needs are, we’d like to use Astra, the theme, and Beaver Builder.” And actually I paused at first because I thought, “Ooh, aren’t we heading away from page builders?” I had this weird little WordPressy moment that a little deeper than maybe some people might have. And then I thought, “But I’m also paying some significant money here to this agency that I really trust and they know better than me.” I mean, I feel like for this particular instance. So I said, “Yes, go ahead and do that.”

And when they got more into it, and I started poking around into it and we were finalizing, it had been several years, maybe a handful of years since I’d used Beaver Builder. I’d used it on a site, one of my BobWP, back some time ago. And at first, I went in there and thought, “Oh man, I don’t remember this sucker.” And it’s probably changed some, but they walked me through a bit and showed me some stuff, and then it started all coming back, and I thought, “Oh, yeah, yeah.” I thought, “Now, oh, I remember this, yeah. Oh, this is cool. Yeah, I can get in the flow here.” So there was this muscle memory of returning to a page builder after several years, but it started clicking, and now, pretty much, I don’t spend a lot of time adding and subtracting stuff. In fact, I’m going to be doing some stuff and hiring somebody else to do it because again, that’s just not what I want to do. I want to make sure it’s done right. But it was interesting to get back into a page builder.

Nathan: It was interesting that it was an agency that gave you that push though, but also given that you recently have redesigned BobWP and you decided not to use a page builder, I’m curious about that decision. Was that just you thinking, “I’m going to do it in inverted commas, ‘The WordPress way?’” I don’t know what that means, but in other words, “I’m not going to install a third party thing. I’m just going to try it with Blocks.” Okay, you are going to install a third party thing. In this case it’s called Kadence, but you’re going to try and do it inside the Block editor. Why did you do it that way?

Bob: I think what happened is I was looking at what I needed and I thought, “I essentially need a homepage that shows these few things, and then I’m going to have two or three other simpler pages. Those pages don’t need a lot of whatever.” And I actually thought, “Well, I have this theme, I have this page builder, I have a license, maybe I should put it in there.” And I thought, that almost, even at that point, seemed too much work for me. It seemed like I’m adding on another layer. For Do the Woo, it works wonderfully because I have a lot more intricate layouts within it, and I knew that if I could get this homepage down, the rest is easy. I don’t have to worry about anything else.

And so my first grab was at Kadence. I thought, “Before I even think about anything else that will involve a little bit more time of thinking, it was, let me look at this and see if one of these templates just jump out at me and would actually be able to work with what I want to present on the homepage. And fortunately you did. So it was like, “Let’s go this step. Let’s see if I can do it the easiest way first since it’s here, ready to go, and then if I need to do something else, I may take that next step.”

Nathan: So you weren’t sold, you could have gone back to, I don’t know, Page Builder, Beaver Builder, Elementor or a whole bunch of others, but you didn’t. You found something in there that you liked and that was fine. Yeah?

Bob: Yeah. I had to have that epiphany moment. Within an hour, I gave it an hour. If I can’t find a template that really looking at it within an hour, then I need to do something else here, because now I’m more familiar with Astra and Beaver Builder.

Nathan: Sorry, I’m just totally taking over your podcast here. I’m just asking you a bunch of questions. How did you cope with the… Okay, so let’s say you’ve got a typical page builder and what you see is literally what you get. I mean, obviously the UI of the page builder disappears when you click publish or save or whatever the word might be. But broadly speaking, what you’ve got, pixel by pixel is the same, whereas Blocks, that’s not what you’re getting all the time, is it? There’s subtle differences or quite dramatic differences, in some cases. So you’ll save it and you’ll have to go onto the front end and you go, “Ooh, okay, that’s slightly different. The padding there isn’t what I expected.” Because of the UI of Guttenberg, the little plus icon that appears and consumes some room. How did you find all that? Was it okay?

Bob: That was the thing. When I opened it, I looked at the template and I thought, “Okay, they have these, I don’t know what you’d call, I don’t know the technical term, but they’d have certain things placed that were blank spots. Some block in there that basically was letting something shift over to the left and right.” I was very careful because I did hit something and I thought, “Well, can I just get rid of this thing?” And then everything went spastic. It was like, “Whoa, what happened here? This entire block is now a little bit different or a lot different.”

I was looking at that and my mind was, “I’ve got to do these big areas of blocks.” They had sections with three, four or five blocks in them. Can I just delete that section? Getting in and doing the blocks, I was a lot more careful with. A lot of them I thought, “Okay, this one has three or four highlights.” And then you’d put some texts on the side, so you’d have to pick three or four what you want to feature. If people go to my site, they’d probably understand. It was community, something like that. So I forced myself to think of that number because I didn’t dare get rid of one because I thought, “Is that going to screw up something or is that going to shift something up?”

So I had to really work well with what I had in mind, and at the same time, I had to be a little creative and think, “Ooh, maybe I thought of presenting it this way, but I think I could do it this way instead.” So I was very flexible and it wasn’t written in stone that I was geared to a look that I may have had inside my head. It was, “I’m going to use this template as well as I can and present my information.”

Nathan: I think it’s joyous and frustrating in equal measure at the moment. That you get great moments of pleasure, “Oh, I pulled it off.” Or, “Oh, look, that template’s really nice and it does 90% of what I want.” And then get the frustration of, “Oh, I’ve just deleted something and realized that that was actually pushing something to the left, and now it’s no longer to the left, and it’s consuming a 100% of the width, okay.” And you just learn the way that Blocks do things or Kadence Blocks in particular do things or Generate Blocks the way that they do things.

And it’s difficult to settle on. I have this thing like a child in a sweet shop or a candy shop, I guess you might say, where I’m constantly on the lookout for the next thing because that just fascinates me and that that’s a problem for me because I never quite seem to be able to settle on one particular tool. Try them all, never get particularly adept on any of them, and that’s an Achilles heel of mine. But given what I do, which is talk about WordPress, I think I can forgive myself that because got to know what all of these things are doing.

Bob: So anyway, that was my adventure, and I thought it would be great to just talk a little bit about this. I’m sure it could go on forever and ever, but I could feel the pain there for a moment. And the pain was my restraint of resources, and that was basically time. I don’t have the time. And I’m sure there’s a lot of people, and I wasn’t going to pay for some… Because I knew this had to be fairly simple for me, because I’ve done this enough, and back in the day, I used to do design, so I knew it could be done. I just needed to find the right magic moment, I guess.

Nathan: It’s interesting as well, because I guess, given that you’ve now spent a bit of time with Kadence, maybe that’ll be your go-to next time.I wonder how that works in the market, if a particular theme captures somebody and they like it, I wonder what the chances of them are going and exploring other options.

Bob: Yeah, that’s a good point because I actually thought of, I have my other blog, the one I write about Porto, our move to Porto, and I’m thinking of maybe putting Kadence in there too and playing around with that because I don’t even know what I used. I can’t even remember what I used. It’s a pretty basic site, but I thought maybe that might be fun to do. So as I build that out a little bit, but I’m not adding it to the list right now, that’s for damn sure.

Nathan: I think you should try something else. I think you should be deliberately obstinate with yourself and say, “Okay, I’ve tried that one. Now I’m going to try another one and see where we go.”

Bob: Well, I tried that with this one, and you see what happened.

Nathan: Did it in a day, wasn’t so bad. Pretty nice.

Bob: But that you were talking about Generate Block, that intrigues me too. It intrigues me enough that someday if I suddenly have the urge, I might have to check that out. It doesn’t intrigue me so much that… And it’s just not Generate Blocks, it’s just anything anymore. I don’t get curious enough like I used to in WordPress. Now I want to focus on my content and stuff, and I’ve become one of those where its like, somebody else help me or give me advice or do whatever. I just need to move on.

Nathan: You talk to people who are curious, don’t you? And they are the people that are curious on your behalf. Yeah, I’m broadly the same now. I think that’s fair to say.

Bob: Well, before we wrap up, speaking of page builders, I know you have an event coming up, so what’s going on with that?

Nathan: Yeah, so we have this event, and it’s called the Page Builder Summit. The URL is really unsurprisingly pagebuildersummit.com, and at the minute, we’re a couple of weeks away from launching it. It’s going to be happening for the week. It happens for five days. It’s going from the 20th to the 24th of February, and it’s just basically for WordPress Page Builders. We have a fairly large history of doing fairly technical stuff. We’ve had people really digging into the weeds of how Blocks are built and how Page Builders can achieve this, that, and the other.

And this year is no different. Like I said, it’s going from the 20th to the 24th of February. It’s totally free. There’s an option to watch any of the presentations, and there’s 30 odd presentations, I can’t remember the exact number off the top of my head, but there’s over 30, and you can watch them free for 48 hours after they initially come out. So if one comes out 9:00 AM on Monday, it’ll be available until 9:00 AM on Wednesday. And if you fail to do that, we have this upsell thing where you can buy access like you have on a typical summit.

But we’ve got loads of different speakers. If you go to the URL that I mentioned a minute ago, pagebuildersummit.com, you can see all the speakers listed actually, and what their presentation titles are. I won’t bore you with those, but you’ll see there’s a ton of different options, whether you’re technical or into marketing or whatever it might be. And yeah, we’re just hoping that people show up and enjoy the experience. It’s actually quite nice doing this. It’s a nice little community because dotted throughout the event, we have these Zoom calls where we just all hop on and do a bit of co-working, or we might just natter about a particular subject, and it’s really nice.

There’s a Facebook group that’s attached to it. There’s about 2000 people in the Facebook group just dedicated to this event. We put it to sleep. Facebook allows you to pause a group, so we pause it when the summit ends, I don’t know, 10 days after the summits end, and then actually, just today I resurrected it and it’s back. So anybody who wants to join that Facebook group, you can do that. The way that you keep in touch, if you are interested, then you go to that URL and click the button, which says, “Grab your free ticket.” There’s these pink buttons all over the website, all over the website. Fill in your email address and we’ll keep you posted. But hopefully, it’ll be a fun event and you can watch it live or you can do the replay thing.

Bob: Cool. All right, sounds excellent. Well, Nathan, thanks for being willing to come in here and just going to shoot off the hip here and talk about stuff. None of this is planned. It’s just a conversation, something I’ve experienced, something I come across. It’s fun to have another person come in and be a guest cohost and, as you said, natter about. I love it.

Nathan: Nice. Well, thank you for having me. Bob, I’ve very much enjoyed having you on the WPBuilds podcast. Thanks so much. We’ll see you again soon.