Thanks, this was really helpful! I'd love to see you make a side-by-side direct comparison between the Ollie theme and Spectra One theme sometime - showing the feature differences, pros and cons etc. That would be great to help decide which theme is best for a particular scenario. :)

Great review, guess two things could be mentioned: local hosted google fonts (coming in wp 6.5), block variation options in the style editor. Spectra One is great, but heavilly dependant on spectra blocks for the patterns, Ollie has a great pattern library, but tied to local variables (meaning, not changeable site-wise by using the style editor), 2023 is the overall best, but lacks google fonts, unless one installs twentig or another plugin. Greenshift is great speedwise, but it's pattern library is both tied to it's blocks plugins and based in local variables, so no site-wise changes. One great thing in Greenshift is auto-hide fixed header / reveal on scroll-up.

Thank you! I have been using Elementor and I have been really interested in learning block editing but it has been a bit overwhelming! Just trying to find one or two themes I might use to try it out... and really enjoying your channel. So many web geek channels get kind of intense with their opinions, I really like your videos and style. It makes it feel more approachable.

Thanks Jamie. Another useful video. Selecting the best starting point for a WP project isn't easy,. Your factors are great, and to my mind findng some appealing design patterns and solid leverage of Gutenberg features are a must have to get on any shortlist. After that the most critical are ease-of-use features, good quality ongoing support, and compatibility with a wide range of blocks. I've been trialling Ollie and Spectra One and agree with other comments asking you to do a head-to-head comparison video. I love the design elements of Ollie, but Spectra is better in some subtle ways. For example it supports google fonts out of the box, no plugin required. And the Brainstorm Force support has been great, helping with issues and keeping it updated as new versions of WP are released. It also comes with a site template library to help wth different use cases. Ollie is great too, but essentially it's been developed by a one or two-man operation and I worry about long-term support and development.

Thank you! I have been hoping you would do exactly this video for a couple weeks!

Nice video like always, Jamie! Looking forward to see side-by-side comparison of block themes. I just finished customizing TT3, something I always avoid and kinda what many people "scare" of. Lol. Even though Block Editor is my first go-to builder, I'd prefer pairing it with classic themes and Gutenberg addons. Tbh it was confusing at first. But after spending some time, I changed my mind. It's really great to know that we can build beautiful websites right off the box. Without relying anything else! I've tried almost every builder out there and I'm amazed at what WordPress has to offer. Thanks for inspiring people to get into Gutenberg, Jamie!

Excellent insight Jamie... Lots of important things to consider when choosing a Theme.

Thanks Jamie. Don't agree with you all the time, but OllieWP theme is great! 👍

Thank you, useful information!

"Do you like the design" ... But what is the best Theme choice when you do have a design at first that you have to follow and to apply on the website that is just 1 communication channel of many your customer has. Do I jump to custom made theme, or block theme ... or are there (block) themes out there ready to set easy to your hand? I'm used to use GenesisWP, with all these new WP transformations, I'm doubting this is still the best bet/choice. How do you see that Jamie?

Very good content, thank you!

The only thing I don't like is Block themes right now are too basic... look Divi on the other side of the road (with too much additional features). However you can do almost anything with Divi (I don't use it by the way). For example only few of the have sticky at to cart.

Thank you very much, great to be able to preview 2024 and play a bit with several themes though I'm still pretty happy with Ollie.. Though the 2nd time I logged in I don't see Spectra?

Isn't there a missing feature in FSE that, even though the theme developer offered alternative templates for, say, the Page; you can't set one of them to be the default for new Pages. So, even though they might offer a Page and a Page with Sidebar, you end up customising the Page to add a sidebar - see what I mean? Or have I missed a setting somewhere?

Hi Jamie, really nice video, thanks! One question, how can I test or understand the performances without using a specific theme?

I hope to see a rapid website recreation episode with WooCommerce!

Is it possible to create different sidebars for different pages? I previously used the Genesis Framework and the Genesis Simple Sidebar plugin to achieve this. What I don’t want to do is have cookie cutter sidebars on every page of the website under Gutenberg and the FSE experience.

Popularity does not account for sustainability. Does the developer have a way to have a constant and stable income, in order to fix bugs, add features, adapt to the constantly changing WordPress ecosystem.

Tank You!

Ooh I missed the Fluid text feature in Twenty Twenty Three somehow, trying it out, works way better than breakpoints. Finally a reason to use those S/M/L/XL/XXL sizes! I had all of that switched off and was using CSS. Still have to for some things. I wish they'd make that something you could more easily change in the UI, rather than theme.json...a bit like some commercial themes have breakpoints or sizes for different devices. That might help with say, margins, cos I want to have different margins/padding for mobile and wide screens. At the moment that's mostly what I use breakpoints for, but it's fiddly. If they really want to 'replace CSS with json and blocks' they need to have that built in.

Thanks! I'm a block head now.

IMHO, now that we have FSE, the core team should stop making a new theme each year. Instead just keep the current theme updated with the latest features and review for security, performance and bugs. If it needs some design freshness, then add another Style. Make the default theme the best theme, not the latest theme.

Very strange both this video and your previous one started about 20 sec into the video (right at the end of the PMP ad.... does YT have some AI to jump over intro-ads?!

Would you make any considerations regarding Core Web Vitals?

kadence or blocksy and postx pro

Kadence Pro all the way especially with the extras like Kadence Elements, Kadence Shop and Kadence Elements

For me The fastest and Additional funtionalities😮😮😮😮

What about mobile menus?

Custom theme 😊

TT4 FTW!

The best theme is the one with the least amount of bullshit code in it. Barebones, Html5 Blank, Underscores.

According to you elementor is Overripe bananas