Rebuilding The SoapstoneWorks Website

One of my recent projects was converting an older static HTML website to a modern responsive website with a WordPress admin system. A static HTML website is hard to update. You need quite a bit of knowledge and skills that’s unlike anything most people have exposure to. However, updating the content on a WordPress most of you will find intuitive.

Here is the before and after on the site. My client liked and wanted to keep the old design and so that did not change much. But now the site is responsive design which works better on mobile devices, and the client can add to it whenever they want without any help.

The theme I used for this is the very latest from WordPress, the TwentyNinteen Theme. I wanted a theme that will work for my client for a good long time, and was already adapted to the new Gutenberg content editor. However, this site does not look anything like the default TwentyNineteen theme.

Gutenberg is the new WYSIWYG content editor for WordPress. I read somewhere it is also being added to Drupal. It is not yet perfect or even as good as the old content editor, but it’s good enough to use on most blogs. Here are the bugs I’ve found in Gutenberg so far:

• The editor only supports basic tables. It wont let you add colspan or rowspan, and will filter them out of your HTML if you add either by hand.
• There is no <code> element in the editor. I had to add <code> here by hand.
• The presentation of a Photo Gallery block is messed up on the iPAD (maybe also iOS). CSS Fix: .wp-block-gallery .blocks-gallery-image figure, .wp-block-gallery .blocks-gallery-item figure{height: auto;}
• The editor does not automatically remove empty list items, and its hard (or impossible?) to remove them except by hand. See below.