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Blocks

Unyson+ speaks the WordPress block editor's language while keeping everything it already has — the page builder, the header/footer builder, the shortcode library, Theme Settings and the classic PHP templates.

That is a deliberate position, not a transitional one.

The principle: join, don't convert

WordPress is consolidating around a set of interchange formatstheme.json for the design system, block markup for content, block.json for components, Block Bindings for dynamic data, and the Interactivity API for front-end behaviour. Every new platform capability plugs into one of them.

A framework that does not speak those formats is not broken — nothing about it stops working — but it becomes an island: new WordPress capabilities arrive as things it can only watch.

So the question Unyson+ asks is not "how do we become a block theme?" It is:

For each format WordPress is standardising, is Unyson+ a participant or an island — and what is the cheapest way to participate?

Every step on the roadmap is additive. Nothing existing is removed, deprecated, or rewritten.

What this means in practice

  • Classic themes are not deprecated by WordPress, and Unyson+ does not treat them as legacy. The parent theme stays a classic PHP-template theme.
  • The page builder is not going away. Blocks are a second authoring surface, never a second rendering path — block output is produced by the same server-side code as the equivalent shortcode, so the front end is identical either way.
  • You can use both. A site can build some pages with the page builder and others in the block editor, and they render through the same pipeline.

Where things stand

AreaStatus
Design system published to theme.jsonShipped
Blocks extension (block library)Built, not yet released
Block Bindings for custom fieldsPlanned
Page-builder → block markup exportExploring

See the roadmap for detail and for what changes next.