Single Page Editing: show different set of layouts in onboarding

[vindl]

Based on the work in #43284 we should show a different set of layouts in the design selector that are based on Seedlet Blocks theme. Folks on View team will work on creating those, but until they are ready we can use mock layouts to test the functionality.

[vindl]

I just learned from @ianstewart that the existing Layouts in Gutenboarding will work for single page site too. I think the only thing remaining here is to make sure that the previews still look right with Seedlet blocks theme and that it's activated for the site.

[ianstewart]

@allancole @kjellr or @jffng Any concerns about adding seedlet and seedlet blocks to our public theme directory? If we don't network activate it? It doesn't need to be any amount of finished. (As long as it doesn't produce fatal errors.) Just to see if we could start hooking it up for testing like the scenario above? (Seeing if it can be applied to a preview in Gutenboarding.)

[jffng]

Just merged seedlet + seedlet blocks to the a8c/themes repo:

Automattic/themes#2114
Automattic/themes#2115

Looking forward to see it used in this context, I'll be onboard to help fix issues.

[ianstewart]

Step one done!

@allancole now that these are in the themes github repo … I can't recall if anything will break if these are moved to /pub in wpcom svn without network activating. Because I've never used GH to deploy themes on WP.com and it's been a while since I've hacked something in /pub. :)

[allancole]

I can't recall if anything will break if these are moved to /pub in wpcom svn without network activating.

No nothing should break in that scenario. Especially, if you’re testing these on a sandbox. I usually just deploy themes from GH to SVN manually to my sandbox and then deploy (or not) from there.

[ianstewart]

It's available in /pub now thanks to @allancole. You'll need to use a non-showcase method to activate it. (Probably WP CLI.) And the core-site-editor-enabled sticker on a test site.

[noahtallen]

I tested changing the config of one of the layout options to use seedlet-blocks as the theme.

Good news: it correctly activates the theme on the site!

A couple of oddities:

Layout preview in gutenboarding doesn't work. I assume this is related to the theme demo site

The theme page for seedlet in calypso looks weird. you can see this by looking at the active theme on the site:

[ianstewart]

The theme page for seedlet in calypso looks weird. you can see this by looking at the active theme on the site:

This'll be true until we have someway of hiding this theme while it's network-activated. :) (It might be a bit too buggy to network-activate now.) Once we have that we can set up a demo site and theme showcase page and network activate with it only being shown for the subset of users we choose.

[noahtallen]

sounds good!

[simison]

@noahtallen in case it's helpful, this is how the API gets the demo URL for the template:

$theme_slug = 'pub/' . $theme_name; // We'll need to modify this if we want it to work for premium themes.
$demo_url = wpcom_get_theme_demo_site( $theme_slug );

In class-wpcom-json-api-template-demo-endpoint.php

[noahtallen]

Thanks! I dug into that code a few days ago. It works correctly, but fails at the point where it takes the DOM of the demo site and changes the post content. (It fails because FSE on the demo site isn't rendering post content correctly, which will be fixed by the FSE plugin sync, which turns off FSE demo templates)

[noahtallen]

Or at least, that's my working understanding of the problem, which might change after I test it again today :p