Twenty Twenty-Two Theme Review 💥
WordPress 6.6.1 introduces its first "Block Theme" named Twenty Twenty-Two with Full-Site Editing (FSE). This new WordPress theme uses blocks to create all areas of your website, including your header, navigation area and footer. The new Site Editor allows you to create and edit blocks and provides additional control for styling and typography. To give you complete control over the design of your website, a new template system was introduced.
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TWENTY TWENTY-TWO THEME RATING
One would almost feel sorry for the Wordpress developpers as they try really hard and come up with new stuff but their themes get very bad ratings. Have a look at the image below and see how almost the same amount of people score it 1 or 2 stars as 5 stars. In total giving it an average rating of 3.4 which is just extremely bad.
HOW START WITH THE TWENTY TWENTY-TWO THEME?
Well, if you have WordPress 6.6.1 on your website then you also have this new theme. Just go to the theme section and activate it. The theme has already built up 200,000+ active installations within a few months. Quite logical, since the theme is already in Wordpress, it is of course widely used. Also because people are curious about it.
TWENTY TWENTY-TWO SITE EDITOR
The new Site Editor is used instead of the WordPress theme customizer for block themes like Twenty Twenty-Two. This menu can be accessed via the WordPress appearance menu. The WordPress theme customizer may still be used whenever a theme requiers it.
TWENTY TWENTY-TWO TYPOGRAPHY
Twenty Twenty-Two uses Source Serif Pro font to create its headings. It is paired with a simple and easy-to-read sans-serif font. Sans Serif Fonts are amongst the Graphic Design Trends for [2024]. The following font sizes are available in the editor for the Twenty Twenty-Two theme: 16px, 18px, 20px, 24px, 40px, 96px, 144px.
2022 REVIEW: BLOCK STYLING
The Site Editor allows you to customize the styling of specific blocks on your website. This is a great improvement that website owners will appreciate. Styling is all very basic though, don't expect to much of it.
2022 REVIEW: COLORS
You can set the default colors for your theme as well as global elements like text, links and background. You can also configure solid colors and gradients. There is no advanced color editor like the ones we find in Photoshop or great themes as Divi or Astra. To be honest it is very basic just like the Block Styling.
TWENTY TWENTY-TWO TEMPLATES
WordPress now has its own template system, and it's integrated directly into the Site Editor. All layouts can be accessed from the pages that contain templates and parts of them.
- Templates This displays page templates like your home page, blog index, search results pages, and archives page.
- Template parts - This shows you template parts like your header or footer
What Wordpress actually does here is imitate all the top page builders and themes that offer hundreds of templates The 11 templates such as searchpage, archive, single post, etc. all represent very little in terms of design. Templates can now also be saved and reused on multiple pages. If these are adjusted by you, that will immediately change on all these pages. This is also something that page builders like Divi and Elementor have been offering for years, and they have a much clearer and better system for it.
TWENTY TWENTY-TWO: THEME BLOCKS
The Block Inserter is the large plus (+) symbol in the top right of the Site Editor or Block Editor. It breaks down blocks into categories like text, media, design, and widgets. WordPress 6.6.1 introduces a new category, theme. It lists 23 blocks that can be used to create your website design. Only 20 of them can be used in the Block Editor.
These are the theme blocks
- Navigation, Site Logo Site Title Site Tagline Query Loop Posts List
- Template Part, Header and Footer, Post Title, Excerpt, or Featured Image
- Post Content, Author, Post Date. Post Categories. Post Tags.
- Next Post, Previous Article, Post Comments Log In/Out, Term Description and Archive Title
2022 REVIEW: PATTERNS
Pre-made blocks can be added to your WordPress website by clicking a button. These patterns are also called Block Patterns. These patterns were introduced to the WordPress 5.8 Block Editor, but WordPress themes still used the WordPress theme customizer at the time so there wasn't any need for WordPress themes that supported patterns.
Because of its integration with the Site Editor, patterns will be an integral part of block themes like Twenty Twenty-Two. Twenty Twenty-Two has a wide range of patterns to help you design your website. You can choose from unique patterns for your header and footer as well as blog posts. Sounds all very nice but these are things that were invented 15 years ago of course.
TWENTY TWENTY-TWO REVIEW CONCLUSION
It is not entirely clear to me why Wordpress is doing its best with its new versions and new themes to reinvent the wheel. Both the disgustingly bad Gutenberg editor and the new templates are useless because all the top page builders do a much better job on this one. Well, Gutenberg costs nothing, but Elementor also has a free version that is 20x better than Gutenberg so why not just install that instead of tinkering with all the outdated stuff Wordpress itself is trying to offer?
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