Pattern Overrides: The final Gutenberg adoption barrier just fell

For the first 15 years, WordPress's editing experience remained largely consistent, based on the TinyMCE editor, now known as the "Classic Editor”. This simple WYSIWYG tool allowed for basic text editing, ideal for text-content-heavy blogs and websites.

However, achieving modern, dynamic designs required either an extensive list of plugins and/or custom development. While WordPress evolved into a powerful CMS with broad adoption beyond personal blogs, numerous plugins emerged to replace the default editor with more flexible and dynamic interfaces.

The Launch of the Gutenberg Editor

The launch of the Gutenberg editor marked a significant shift in WordPress's approach to content creation. However, its initial reception went from mostly negative after the initial anouncement, to mixed feelings after the first year, due to a steep learning curve both for WordPress developers and users.

The block-based system promised greater flexibility and creativity, with a great migration path from mostly text-based websites. And yet, many users found it challenging to transition from the editing experience they got used to.

Users of page building plugins like Visual Composer, Elementor, Beaver Builder or Divi found the creative controls the new editor offered lacking, and even seasoned developers needed their time to adjust to the shift of the JavaScript based editor from a primarily PHP-based ecosystem.

To this day, the "Classic Editor" plugin that allows content editors to go back to how things were before (ah, the good old days) is one of the most popular WordPress plugins, with over ten million installations.

Patterns and Synced Patterns

As with any decision made within the WordPress community there will always be wildly different user bases, that will want the WordPress project to take different directions.

For the development of professional business and enterprise websites, the new editor was suddenly allowing users much more control over design and layout, in adition to just content. These decisions are usually pre-determined in the begin of a development project, to ensure a consistent web experience without having to train every content editor on which rules and guidelines to follow.

With the introduction of Block Patterns, this use case got some love through quality of live improvements in the WordPress core feature-set. Patterns can be used to define a combination of blocks, that an editor can easily drop onto new pages, without having to assemble the individual blocks in columns, groups and sections anew.

Synced Patterns further advanced this concept by enabling changes to a pattern, to be applied universally across multiple pages. This was the first important step from freedom to create completely different sections across pages, towards also enabling content editors in maintaining a cohesive and consistens design system.

Synced Pattern Overrides

Local overrides to globally synced patterns, as introduced in June 2024, sound like an oxymoron at first, but are a powerful enhancement to the WordPress editing experience, and I can’t think of a reason why it shouldn’t be adopted by every single Gutenberg-based WordPress site.

Starting with WordPress 6.6 you can mark basic block types within a synced pattern as “overrideable”. Conceptially this feels very similar to configuring a set of user-editable custom fields, seperate from their presentation, like we are used to with the ACF plugin, or any other CMS that supports custom field configuration out of the box.

This also makes the editing experience much simpler, as only the editable elements of the pattern (with the labels you defined) are shown in the list view:

This flexibility ensures that while the overall design and structure remains consistent visually and semantically (accessibility anyone?), but allowing for easy changes to the content pieces itself for all the different sections of the site.

By integrating Synced Pattern Overrides, WordPress has significantly enhanced its ecapability and ease of us when managing complex websites, offering designers, developers, and content editors a more dynamic and efficient toolset to build out high quality rich-content web experiences.

This innovative new approach already streamlines the workflow, reduces redundancy, and ensures that unique content needs can be met without compromising the overall site design in it’s current state, even though some planned features haven’t meet the cutoff date for the latest WordPress release yet.

New workflow for designers, developers, and content editors

The introduction of Pattern Overrides revolutionizes how designers, developers and content editors build and maintain WordPress websites:

Designers can now create and tweak intricate layouts effortlessly, ensuring brand consistency while retaining creative freedom. A design system with individual components, sections and pages can be translated from design software to Gutenberg Patterns (plain, synced or with overrides), so content editors can confidently create top-notch pages and posts.

Developers, on the other hand, can focus on building robust functionalities more efficiently by utilising more WordPress core functionality, confident that the critical elements are easily manageable by non-technical users.

This synergy creates a cohesive, efficient workflow, enabling the development of scalable, easy-to-maintain websites that meet diverse business needs, and is just what the ecosystem needed to make the web a better place for everyone.

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Want to know more about the implication this feature will have on the WordPress ecosystem or how to be among the first to adopt it?

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