RDP- Reinstall

RDP- Reinstall

This is the perfect topic for me to talk about my experience with the new “Full Site Editor” on WP. I’ve built websites before (a long time ago) and adjusted to the new block editor from the classic editor. So I wasn’t resistant to the FSE. It sounded good in that I could customize some things that weren’t available with the theme I had. I read up on the FSE before I took the leap. Seemed straightforward.

The first thing I had to do was change themes. I wasn’t thrilled about it but I found one that was structurally close to what I needed. I changed over, with the current data transferring over to the new theme. Starting over from scratch would’ve been a no-go. I was working on the home page only. I didn’t need to change anything on the post pages.

The FSE Editor looks a lot like this block editor, with a few extras. I also went to the customizer in the dashboard to see if there was anything different that I could do. A lot of the blocks on the page were in a jumble i.e. images on top of one another and moved. The text blocks seemed to be ok. I wanted to change the font of the title to something less “blocky”. After looking through all of the tutorials (because I couldn’t find anything about the fonts ON the editor), I went to the tool that dealt with fonts. It was useless. I couldn’t change the font.

There were a lot of things that weren’t available to change. I can’t remember them now. I do know that the widgets tool was removed, which removed my Creative Commons license and there was no way that I could find to put it back. After several hours of trying to get something done, I was pretty frustrated. I saved every change as I went. I’d checked the home page several times in previews and then I decided to check it on the browser, like I was a visitor. I got the bright idea to check a post page. Guess what? ALL of the post pages were changed to the exact same home page. W…T…F…!? Enter that panicked feeling when you fear you’ve lost everything in the blink of an eye. You’re supposed to be able to reverse the changes you’ve done. Yeah…no.

The next thing to do at that point was to hunt frantically for the original post pages in the desperate hope that they weren’t transformed into fairy dust floating in the ozone. Typing in the URL for the particular post page only brought up the home page copy. With many expletives going through my brain, I went to the dashboard to look at the Pages section to see if by some miracle they were there. They were, as well as the new ones that cloned the home page. At this point I was done fighting with the FSE; it won the day by hijacking my post pages.

I mentally crossed my fingers while I deleted the clone pages and reinstalled my original theme. There was massive relief when my site was restored to it’s original glory. I kinda felt like one of those people on “Botched” who tried to “improve” something on themselves and it went four-legs-up. By pure luck my situation was resolved.

Maybe it was all my fault but in any case, it shouldn’t be such a PITA for us regular folks. In my opinion, the FSE is NOT great, cool, EASY, or an improvement for my site. I did research on it, learned what I could before I tried it and still my site took a swirl down the toilet. I’m staying away from the FSE from here on out. Hopefully, if you try it, it’ll work better for you.

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