Trying to figure out where Bricks fits into the WordPress ecosystem

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Hi Bricks users! This is my first post - I’m trying hard to figure out my best path forward as an agency employee building WordPress sites for clients. After having played in Bricks for quite a bit now, I really love the Builder’s interface, and the way it exposes all the properties of the elements in a very code-conscious way, and the huge flexibility and performance from the clean code generated.

So, I have two main questions:

First, I’ve been trying to wrap my head around the differences between Classical and Block WordPress themes, and where all the popular page builders fit into those systems. To me, Bricks feels like a much more advanced, usable and flexible alternative to the Gutenburg block editor - but technically it seems that the Bricks theme is a Classic PHP-based theme rather than a Block theme. Ditto with the fact that we can use Bricks to build templates and basically accomplish Full Site Editing. Is this a hybrid featuring the best of both worlds? Please let me know your take on that question.

Finally, how do the rest of you feel about building most sites from a blank slate vs. starting from a traditional, professionally designed industry-specific WordPress theme? To me, it feels a bit scary stepping away from having that predefined starting point. I know there is a growing market of templates available for Bricks, but I kind of see myself still reviewing available fully-formed site designs for inspiration to build from scratch in Bricks - but that could end up taking a lot more work. :slight_smile:

Thanks everyone for your input!
David

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Bricks is a full-site builder. It uses templates to achieve that. It is not a block editor/builder. However, it can include Gutenberg blocks and classic WP content inside of it’s templates.

I think of it as building a classic WP theme. In a classic WP theme, you would need to create a file for the header called “header.php”, one for the footer etc. It would have a lot of templates and “template parts”. All of these would need to be included via PHP code. Also the all mighty WP “loop” is now more easily built inside of Bricks using the Query builder. Bricks do all that visually from inside the builder.

So Bricks is a theme builder in a sense.

You are also correct about the lack of professionally built themes.

Even the ones that exists now, I feel like they are lacking the professionalism.

Take for example Kadence - they WON the game and got a lot of traction and followers just because of their awesome pre-built themes and ease of implementation. You just import the theme, it creates all the pages, loads the templates, theme colors etc.

I use a few templates from time to time from Bricks Library - but not even their templates are that great.

So I feel there is a huge opportunity here, exactly on this front, professionally pre-built themes, packed together with a demo importer that creates the pages, loads the default colors and have a nice beautiful wizard to go with it. Maybe I should build this? :slight_smile:

EDIT

So in conclusion, Bricks is missing a 1-click demo importer that when loaded, you have a FULL website, with all the pages (contact, about, team, pricing, etc.) build and loaded for you. So after the 1-click wizard, it should send you to the homepage where you should already see the beauty of the theme in action.

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Thanks for the well thought-out and worded response, Cristian! That does indeed help me understand better what Bricks is all about, and where it fits in. There should certainly be great opportunity for an enterprising person or firm to jump in and start supplying really high-quality pre-built themes under the Bricks system. I’m sure the incentive to do that will increase as Bricks continues to become more well-established.

In the meantime, I may continue to explore some paths to “convert” existing prebuilt themes - perhaps the built-in Gutenberg to Bricks transfer capability might be helpful in establishing quick page layouts which could then be refined, especially if converting a Gutenberg-based theme.

Thanks again for your clear response!