WordPress Gutenberg & Full Site Editing

Master Gutenberg: Build posts, pages, and even customize headers and footers—plus, design your own block theme!

Fully Updated in January 2025.

Gutenberg was launched as an integrated part of WordPress 5.0.  Gutenberg was the name given to the new block editor that replaced the Classic WYSIWYG editor that we'd been using since the early versions of WordPress. 

Gutenberg is the editor of choice as you create the content for your WordPress posts and pages.  There's blocks for headings, blocks for images, blocks for text.  And blocks for just about anything else you'd want to add to a web page.  You can build your posts and pages by dragging the blocks onto, and around, the editor. 

But Gutenberg had a huge update with version WordPress 5.9.  Full Site Editing!  This is often abbreviated to FSE and quite often just Site Editing, but what does this mean?

Using the same block editor (Gutenberg) you've been using for your content, you can now edit and design the headers and footers for your website. So you design the bit at the top of the page, the bit at the bottom, and the bit in the middle.  That means you now have total control over the design of your website.  That is Full Site Editing. You can also create a complete block theme from scratch, and I'll show you how.

This course is designed to get you up to speed quickly with Full Site Editing in WordPress. 

In this course:

• We take a deep dive into using the Gutenberg editor to create better-looking web pages as well as a complete study on the Full Site Editor itself.

• The course showcases the Twenty Twenty-Five theme, which is the latest block theme from WordPress.

• You'll learn how to use the Document Overview and Command Palette to enhance your workflow.

• You'll learn about the normal, wide, and full-width options you can use in your design, and how to set these values yourself.

• You'll look at the box model so you fully understand padding and margin, and when to use each of these to add space around your design elements.

• We'll cover the most common blocks, like paragraph, image, video, button, cover, query loop, columns, table, etc., but also advanced design blocks like Groups, Rows, Stacks, and Grids.

• You'll explore template hierarchy and how themes consist of templates and template parts.

• You'll learn to use Global Styles, including typography (where you'll be able to install and use any Google font you want), color palettes, backgrounds, shadows, layout and spacing, and even how to change the default appearance of any block.

• Following the detailed study of Gutenberg, we'll create a fully functional block theme from scratch, building the template parts and templates required to run a full site. During this process, you'll understand which template you need to create for any post type on your site. We'll even look at using the query loop in a more advanced "manual" way, so you can include multiple query loops on a page for more design flexibility.

• At the end of the course, we'll study all of the other block themes WordPress created, from the Twenty Twenty-Two theme to the Twenty Twenty-Four theme, and how each built on the previous theme, culminating in the latest Twenty Twenty-Five theme that we used and studied during the course.

• A final section of the course looks at a few "extras" that were requested from students of previous versions of the course, like creating a landing page, adding custom CSS to a block theme, and even how to add a sidebar to your theme or just to specific areas of your website.

By the end of the course, you'll have the confidence to take over the design of your own website, using Gutenberg to design the header, footer, and content.  You'll be on your way to mastering Full Site Editing.