Global Styles Ongoing Roadmap

[mtias]

Previously #34574, #9534, #37550. This issue tracks the ongoing roadmap of global styles features and theme.json development.

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Style Variations

The theme objects were designed to be composable. The next idea to unlock is to allow full style objects to be attached to specific templates or patterns. The style objects are managed globally and hooked into concrete templates or patterns. That would allow styling an archive very differently to other templates; having specific color palettes and font sizes for a header template; or using synchronized patterns while modifying them through style objects managed globally.

• Section specific Theme.json #40318
• Global Styles: Ability to manage partial style objects #53480
• Global Styles: Managing style variations #38333.
• Style Variations: Display current modifications in the "Browse styles" panel #53476
• Continuation of Block Style Variations #7551

Style Book

• Style Book: Iterate on presentation and design. #53431
• Style Book: Ability to focus on individual block types. #53432
• Style Book: Integrate patterns #53437

Interface

• Explore improvements to Styles panel in site editor #53483
• Styles: show a hierarchy of styles clearly (theme, user, global unspecific, global specific, local, etc) #49278
• Style Revisions: Offer comparison views #53484
• Consider a standardized way to modify hover/focus/active states for blocks #27075, Standardized way to modify interactive states (:hover, :focus .etc) for blocks #38277, Implicit Text, Hover, Focus Colors as Part of Color Palette #34717.
• Flow for editing the styles of a specific block type #27393.

Tools

• Global Styles Typography #38534
• Allow selecting and connecting ref tokens in the UI.
• Global Styles: Elements support tracking issue #40966
• Iterate on absorbing block styles as part of the global styles mechanism #45198

[annezazu]

I'd like to list the following for inclusion in this general roadmap: #44840, #29388. In particular, being able to have more granular information when saving feels critical in a world of style variations and an increasing number of controls within Styles.

[oandregal]

Substituted #33977 (closed, high-level strategic point of view) by #45198 (tactical next steps) in the "per block styles & supports" section.

[mtias]

Reorganizing the issue, documenting done tasks here for posterity:

• Global Styles: an input for custom CSS #30142
• Global styles – per-block custom css #44412
• Style variations: Add "Randomize" button #39629
• Tracking: Add a Style Engine to manage rendering block styles #38167
• Editor: expose revisions in the UI for all available post types #49601
• Implement block preview on the panels, similar to the typography previews. (Needs design.)
• Block Supports: Tracking issue #41113.
• Allow going from local styles (editing a block in the post editor) to modifying global styles for all blocks of that type (apply these styles to all headings, etc).
• [Fonts API] enqueue programmatically fonts picked in block settings #40386.
• Webfonts: lazily load registered webfonts in the editor #40364.
• [Fonts API] Do not expose registered fonts in block settings (only expose enqueued fonts) #40362.