Feature request: Add (optional) hybrid theme capabilities

[seanrasmussen]

It would be great to have the option to enable some block features, such as theme.json, and other basic block related supports out of the box.

[webguyio]

While you can of course do whatever you like with BlankSlate, technically it is a classic theme.

While this may seem like an innocent enough change, fundamentally, it might not necessarily break sites, but it could break the editing experience in the admin for thousands of people who aren't interested in the block editor.

Maybe https://wordpress.org/plugins/classic-editor/, which they'd likely be using anyway, would balance that? But, I honestly don't know. It's too many "maybes" to implement at the moment.

In the meantime, you might consider my other theme:

https://wordpress.org/themes/block-builder/

[seanrasmussen]

Thanks for responding. I get your reasoning - there are a lot of moving parts. I do think you could have all of the block supports in a subdirectory, or something and comment-out any block thing by default. With the option that if someone wants to use the block editor with a hybrid theme, then they could easily enable it with a file name change and uncommenting out a few lines in functions.php, or something.

It would make Blankslate a starting point for classic and hybrid themes, then. I did find this article on hybrid themes, which anyone who lands on this discussion might be interested in.

[webguyio]

Most likely this is a rare edge case for the typical way most people use BlankSlate, so while it might make it easier for you and a handful of others, it then creates more work for the majority.

This is of course only an educated guess, but it's impossible to know for sure unless I could poll the community and that doesn't work (I've tried). When polling, not even 1% of the community votes, which renders any results useless.

The bigger concern is of course projects that are already live updating, not new projects just being started. I'll leave this open for a little longer just in case anyone comes up with an idea to make this work.