My FSE Experience

Full Site Editing or “FSE” is WordPress’s attempt to make an entire site editable via their block editor. I dove headfirst into FSE this week. After lots of head banging, my conclusion:

Don’t depend on FSE today, but FSE’s future is bright!!

Our main headache was the query block. We encountered lots of weird bugs, like crashing blocks and hidden images. Controlling typography, especially for headings, was also extremely limited and color settings took forever to set, as this ticket highlights.

Still, I have faith in FSE…

Imagine: No CSS coding. No mockups.

The Blocksy theme already saves coding time. Their GUI style controls cover 80% of what designers can imagine. FSE provides additional global style settings that could, theoretically, make custom themes useless. Designers could design their site within WordPress without needing mockups or coding expertise.

For Higher Ed pros, block-based style controls also provide better management over user capabilities. That means accessibility and branding policies can be policed at a code level instead of through visual, human tests.

For those reasons, the future is bright for FSE.

Unfortunately, FSE’s bright future is probably not coming soon.

#research

How do universities create and manage websites?

We launched a survey to help understand how universities create and manage websites. Universities in the US and UK responded to questions that inform the future of Edupack.

What did we find? In short, Universities are not happy with how they manage websites.

Almost 50% of respondents experienced issues with their current setup. That isn’t surprising when we consider that on average, each institute is juggling almost three CMSes.

To compound this, over 50% of those who responded own over 100 websites. And 30.4% are responsible for more than 500 sites.

Those figures do not include rogue websites. These rogue websites are created by university staff without going through any internal review processes.

Another interesting fact: WordPress is used by 100% of respondents in their institution.

Do you manage your institution’s website infrastructure? We’ll continue to update this survey with new responses.

Fill out the survey

#research