WordPress Theme Lock-In, Silos, and the Block System
For many years, I was a hardcore advocate of separating any non-design functionality from themes into their own plugins. I wrote extensively on the issue. Whether it was shortcodes, custom post types, user metadata, and any number of things related to a user’s content/data, I drew a deep line in the sand. This belongs in a plugin. If you have never heard of the “theme lock-in effect,” that’s OK. For many, it is a non-issue. Places like the WordPress.org theme directory have, for the most part, drew a similar line in the sand. The goal has always been to avoid trapping a user into perpetual use of a particular theme. It is not an ideal user experience when some crucial data is no longer available when switching designs. And, all users eventually want to change that up from time to time. Getting stuck with [shortcode-soup] tags littered throughout a site is never fun. Neither is losing admin access to dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of pages from a custom post type that suddenly disappears. The WordPress theme development community has avoided this problem — some more so than others — by bundling crucial content-related features separately in plugins. Those theme…
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