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Hi all. My career has somewhat pivoted towards Software Development in the last few years. So WordPress wise, I’m a bit rusty. Out of nowhere I’ve got 3 WP freelance projects to build over the next few weeks. So the question is what’s changed?! My WP go-to “stack” has always been a custom theme using ACF Pro, SEO Yoast, WordFence and a handful of others. Never got on with Gutenberg. What’s new? Could I still build that way? Don’t want to be a WP dinosaur lol. Any advice or new things I should be looking into? Thanks
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Learn Gutenberg, it will do wonders for the longevity of these builds, and reducing maintenance.
While ACF and custom themes are still a thing, you can incorporate Gutenberg with this as well.
You certainly can still use your stack.
Yoast has been seriously [enshittified](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification); maybe go with another SEO plugin.
fullsiteediting.com
Get familiar with ACF custom blocks.
oxygen site builder plugin.
If your 3 projects are full sites, I would opt for a page builder like bricks or oxygen + acf.
Classic editor, this is still a top set of plugins, just switch out yoast for rank math and you’re golden.
We abandoned Yoast for Rankmath
I would suggest you spend some time tinkering with the latest build and just vanilla 2024 theme. Gutenberg is pretty much annihilating everything you needed page builders for, so if you need one at all it’s going to need to be something really lightweight. I don’t know why the customizer is so limited in 2024 theme, but a few lines of PHP to include some other builtin options for customizer, generate blocks and ACF and if you want some easy addon blocks maybe Kadence blocks. The speed increase on a cheap web host is fantastic.
wd40
https://wordpress.org/documentation/article/site-editor/
https://wordpress.org/documentation/article/wordpress-block-editor/