The painless conversion from Greyd classic theme to the block theme
By Anne-Mieke Bovelett on April 2, 2024
Status: up to date
The smoothest experience ever, which again shows how well Greyd understands agency life!
Thinking about the relaunch of my site, moving from the classic Greyd theme to their new Block theme (or FSE theme as some still call it), gave me many sleepless nights.
There’s power to be had money to be saved in staying close to the WordPress core!
As agency owners, we all know the pain of time invested in troublesome conversions from one system to another. Some commercial page builders and themes with page building capabilities leave you with smoking piles of shortcode crap, for example. Sometimes cleaning those out takes so much time, it’s almost not worth the cost. It can’t be called a lock-in, but if this is about hundreds of pages and posts, it can sure feel like it on a certain level.
The power of using the block editor shows again!
From the side lines I had the joy to observe and learn a lot about ins and outs of block development from a developer’s perspective, in a way that provides me with good context to be able to write about it. Being part of the beta testing squad for the new block theme was torpedoing me into full site editing.
The one thing that bothered me though was the question where and when I was supposed to find the time to completely rebuild my site from scratch in the new theme. I’m 53. The time of pulling all-nighters in a breeze has passed a while ago.
I had visions of days and days of work. Which is not so much related to how hard it is to build a site with the WordPress Site Editor. Because that, in itself, is not hard at all! But it does take time to re-create all pages and template parts. But again, of course, the assumption is the mother of all f…, eh, issues.
“Anne, stop worrying, we made a tool for that!”
Yep, that was the answer I got at Greyd when I voiced my concerns. And here I had another point for the list of advantages of staying close to core. The classic theme from Greyd was already working perfectly with the block editor. Which is again proof why using tools that stay as close to WordPress core as possible is a very healthy choice when your base your websites on WordPress.
Video: it works!
I created a video to show you how that went. In short: I saved my custom CSS from my classic theme, followed the steps as given in the screen that appears.
Why was I talking about money again?
Well… This is maximum result with a minimum of time invested on switching my site from the classic theme to the Greyd block theme (or FSE as some still like to call it).
I don’t know about you. But every hour I can spend as a billable hour, instead of overhead, is a win.