I’ve used themes by Anders Norén before. They’re extremely well made and always free, with no missing features that you need to pay extra for.

One of his more recent ones is Björk – a simple, clean and fast block theme intended for blogs and personal websites. Most importantly, for me, is that it makes use of Full Site Editing (FSE), something I’ve never played with before. And it was really time for me to do so.

Hence, I’m now using this very theme on this site. I hope you like the change.

One of the talks during WordCamp Europe this year got me thinking about moving to a more minimalistic theme and, I have to say, going straight to Anders’ site was what made most sense. Björk didn’t disappoint and the fact that it was an FSE theme would give me an opportunity to, finally, try a theme of this type out.

FSE brings the block editor to designing the look of your theme – you can easily edit sidebars, adding menus, social icons, whatever, as well as various other (theme specific) templates.

It’s still relatively new, and WordPress updates are slowly adding in more features, as well as smoothing over some rough edges. My biggest problem was sorting out the mobile view. There is a desktop sidebar template, in which I added social icons and a search bar, but there is no equivalent for mobile. Mobile has a header specific template and, what I didn’t realise, was that this is the place to do it – add a menu block in and then add these features under it. Here’s what it looked like…

The hardest part of this was adding those social icons. I could add the Social icon block but adding the specific links under it… no idea. I ended up copying the Social block from the sidebar. Even adding in the RSS Feed afterwards was something I couldn’t work out – again, I added it to the sidebar and then copied the whole thing over to the mobile menu again.

Why violently happy? Happy with the theme, but still trying to wrap my head around FSE. But, overall, I’m happy. Lots of tweaking to go though.