I was recently approached by an agency to take on a freelance web development project, unfortunately due to scheduling conflicts I was unable to take the job on but I thought it would be a great opportunity as a test project to try out the new Bootstrap 5 framework and whilst I was at it, why not throw in building a new custom theme with Gutenberg blocks.
I used to use my own custom theme based on Foundation to build my sites so having to learn a new framework was enjoyable as well as frustrating but I have to say I’m quite liking Bootstrap 5 and that’s saying a lot as I used to avoid Bootstrap at all costs! I found it very heavy and cumbersome to use but the new version can be customised and stripped down which is great.
I’ve now got a new custom boilerplate theme I can use to base my WordPress websites on. I’m still not sure about Gutenberg however, I think it has its good points and its bad points. To move away from doing every via code was a scary step for me, I prefer to have control over everything and I am so used to coding it in the backend. For those projects where clients need to do more customisation themselves, I do think it is definitely a step in the right direction and it’s taking on Elementor and other page builder plugins but it definitely does have a long way to go to match these plugins.
I am still developing a custom block based theme using Gutenberg’s reusable blocks and block patterns as custom page templates. It’s taking some getting used to but I’m almost there!