This post outlines the steps I took to create a block-based theme version of Twenty Twenty.Thanks to Kjell Reigstad for helping develop the theme and write this post.

There’s been a lot of conversation around how theme development changes as Full Site Editing using Gutenberg becomes a reality. Block templates are an experimental feature of Gutenberg (as of 7.2.0), and using them to create block-based themes is in exploratory stages of development.

A block-based theme is a WordPress theme with templates entirely composed of blocks so that in addition to the post content of the different post types (pages, posts, …), the block editor can also be used to edit all areas of the site: headers, footers, sidebars, etc.

Gutenberg Handbook

Before diving in, I’ll reiterate that much of how this works is subject to change. This spec is in a very early stage. I hope by writing…