Full Site Editing compatibility for VRI widgets

Hello Julie,

Thanks for the detailed message. Unfortunately, at the moment our widgets do not support FSE themes, and the only thing we can suggest is to look for a plugin that could add the support for legacy widgets, even though this may not exist.

The point is that as of today, June 2022, the WordPress native FSE theme called “Twenty Twenty-Two” is still listing this feature as BETA even on WordPress 6.0, and their official documentation for developers to create new widgets is still referring to the so called “legacy widget”. This is because widget will no longer exists, they do not appear anymore under the Appearance menu as they are “blocks”, not real widgets.

Our programmers don’t want to use any work-around for the widgets to have them rendered through Shortcodes, as our widgets are quite complex and fully connected to the main plugin due to dynamic parameters (category filters, items selection etc..). For this reason, we are looking forward to convert them to “blocks” with a list of available settings that should be dynamically populated. If the widgets were rendered through Shortcodes, then for changing a parameter in the widget, like a category filter, you would have to modify the Shortcode itself, and this is of course not optimal. Shortcodes will serve only as a way to display pages built and rendered by the main plugin, but for the widgets we will have to find a proper and native approach, by keeping of course the support for “legacy widgets”.

We just don’t have any estimate date for this new implementation, which will have to be performed on all our plugins, but we definitely plan to implement the new widget blocks for FSE themes.

Thank you,
The VikWP Team

Many thanks for your prompt, detailed and easy to understand response.

I can fully understand your reasons for waiting until the full release of FSE before creating and releasing your blocks.

I have a site built with a theme which does not have a header widget area. My solution has been to use Elementor purely to edit the header so I could add in the Vikrentitems summary widget.

This is working well but I was exploring ways to move away from Elementor hence why I arrived at full site editing themes.

From what I’m seeing, it’s probably a bit early for me to move over so I’ll continue to work with classic themes for now. I have looked into coding solutions to add a header widget area to any theme so I will probably give that a try next.

Thanks again for your help,
Julie

Thanks for letting us know that your content builder plugin was still able to load widgets dynamically in the “classic” (legacy) way.

Considering that the native FSE tool of the latest Twenty Twenty-Two theme is still flagged as a BETA feature, I would say it is still a bit too early to move onto a FSE theme for a complex site.

For sure our widgets will need to become compatible with any FSE theme, but we are still studying the best solution to keep both formats for any kind of theme. We will definitely add this information to the changelog of each of our plugins as soon as the widgets will be available as blocks.

Thanks again!