Full Site Editing Blueprint for Local

Do you use Local for as your WordPress development environment? Are you interested in learning more about how Full Site Editing works? This post is for you.

Full Site Editing is coming to WordPress…eventually.

As I’ve been reading about FSE and trying to understand how it works, I’ve found it’s helpful to have a playground where I can experiment. I thought I’d share that playground with you, in case you find it helpful.

Using Local Lightening (the artist formerly known as Local by Flywheel) as my local development environment, I spun up a WordPress site that includes the following:

• Gutenberg plugin (with “Full Site Editing” experiment enabled)
• WordPress theme experiments (these are themes with support for full site editing) with the TT1 Blocks theme enabled
• Gutenberg test data (demo blog posts that use the most common Gutenberg blocks)

I exported it as a blueprint (.zip) and you can download it here.

Since writing this article, I’ve discovered an even easier way to distribute the site: Local imports. I’ll leave the instructions for adding blueprints just for reference, but let’s talk about something easier.

Import site into Local (on any platform)

I’ve already done that for you and here is the export. Once you have that, it’s time to import the site into Local (and it really couldn’t be easier). Open up Local and drag/drop the export zip anywhere onto Local. That’s it!

Here’s a video showing you this process in action.

Once you’ve imported a site, the last thing you need to get going is an admin username and password. For the export I’m sharing, the username/password is admin/admin.

Add Local blueprint on MacOS

1. Download the blueprint
2. Move blueprint to ~/Users/[your username]/Library/Application Support/Local/blueprints (If you can’t find this folder, you probably have hidden files set to invisible. From Finder, press CMD+SHIFT+Dot to toggle on visibility)
3. From Local, create a new site. Under Create site from Blueprint, select fullsiteediting
4. Login to /wp-admin with username/password: admin/admin

Add Local blueprint on Windows

1. Download the blueprint
2. Move blueprint to ~/Users/[your username]/AppData/Roaming/Local/blueprints (If you can’t find this folder, you probably have hidden files set to invisible. Follow these instructions to make hidden files visible on Windows.)
3. From Local, create a new site. Under Create site from Blueprint, select fullsiteediting
4. Login to /wp-admin with username/password: admin/admin

Please note that FSE is still highly-experimental, so expect that things may not work as expected. Do not use this on a live site. This blueprint is provided as-is, with no promises. 🙂

Feel free to leave a comment with questions, feedback, etc.