I’ve a confession to make. I’ve never really liked using other people’s software for web development. It’s probably because I’m a dinosaur. I wrote my first website in raw HTML using Notepad, and since then I’ve not looked back. My tool of choice has moved on to Sublime Text, and my websites are a mix of HTML, PHP, Javascript and JSON – but I have never seen the need of Content Management Systems for small sites.
My first foray into WordPress has done little to convince me. If I wasn’t doing this for a client – I may already have given up. To be fair, there is a lot to like, but there are also some issues which are just a little niggling. The menu structure for me is not intuitive. I haven’t spent enough time in it yet to know where everything is – but I keep finding things and then forgetting where they are. Things I think should be grouped together aren’t. Like why is text colour not right there in Typography? When I’m playing with a font I want to do everything in one place.
Also there are things which you click on which look like they should affect the block you are editing but they don’t. I want to set things up once and hopefully not touch them again – so why can I not make a change in a block and then apply it to everything as a style? After a bit of digging I realised there are two style buttons(!) and the one in the toolbar has the option to customise the global settings for each block. That has made things much easier – but I don’t get why it is tucked away there and not available in-line.
Another massive niggle is that I have not found a way to discard layout changes on save. The only choice seems to be to save the changes you didn’t mean to make (or made and didn’t like) and then use undo to revert to the previous state.
Changing WordPress Navigation Link Colours
I’ve just spent an hour trying to change the colour of my navigation bar links. There is nothing in the UI to let you do it as far as I can see. The global link colours don’t touch it. Then, with the help of Google, I found this little gem
.wp-block-navigation
a.wp-block-navigation-item__content
.wp-block-navigation-item__content:hover {
text-decoration:none;
color:red;
}An hour to change one line of CSS and what a mouthful! The real kicker is that when I try to add a second property for the link state, the hover state stopped working. If I’d been doing this in notepad it would simply have been
a.nav:link{text-decoration:none; color:#900;}
a.nav:hover{text-decoration:none; color:#f00;}It would have taken all of two minutes and it would have worked.
Update: A day later and the changes work. I suspect a caching issue was what prevented me from seeing the changes I made
WordPress Styling with Blocks
Patterns, Templates, and Themes (Ad)
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