For years, even decades, I’ve wanted my website to emulate what most people can easily do on social media networks in terms of being able to quickly and easily add different post types (i.e. links, quotes, images, videos, etc) which are effectively short-forms of content versus the typical long-form.
While WordPress used to have this feature prior to Gutenberg, calling it Post Formats, it eventually disappeared from a lot of more modern block-based themes, thus dashing my hopes that Gutenberg would actually make it easier to emulate post formats.
Today, however, after doing a bit of digging, I discovered that there seems to be a resurgence of utilizing post formats once again. And I believe that Nick Bohle’s words below really drive home the reason why.
Since “Social media isn’t social anymore”, the (grassroots) movement of having your website as your personal hub on the internet is gaining more momentum…
Post formats can assist WordPress (e.g. the ActivityPub plugin) in translating posts into activities (such as notes, images, articles, or quotes) and federating them to platforms like Mastodon or PixelFed.
Nick Bohle
WordPress, Post Format and Default Themes
But beyond Nick’s words, a lot of other people also seemed to want to reintegrate post formats back into WordPress, based upon this Bring Post Formats to Block Themes GitHub discussion which was originally created in 2023 but went well into 2024.
Due to this discussion (and probably others), I believe this is why post formats were re-introduced back into the current Twenty Twenty-Five theme, which is amazing to say the least.
As I originally stated, my main desire for using post formats again is because of their ability to easily and quickly share short-form content, while your mind ruminates on what long-form content you’d like to write about it.
And sharing this short-form content is extremely important to me because probably 90% or more of my daily work is based upon these small pieces, loosely joining and creating long-form ideas and thoughts.
To put this another way, this short-form content is really where the creativity happens in my work, yet its completely invisible to most people. They just see a long-form post instead and might be perplexed how I got to that point or made that leap of logic.
That said though, it’s important that this short-form content doesn’t overload and drown out my long-form content. Thus I need to create links that filter out and separate my short-form content from my long-form content, thus allowing people to see what I’m narrowing in on (i.e short-form) or stepping back and seeing a bigger picture of (i.e. long-form).
To put this another way, I want to visibly show how things bubble up and emerge within my mind.
That’s it for now and it definitely won’t be all sun and roses. While I’ve created quotes, links, videos, and aside post formats for now, really the hard work will be trying to bend the Twenty Twenty-Five theme to my will and get it to work the way I want it to because I’ve played with it in the past and the basic styling and structuring is not playing nice and working like I logically expect it to (perhaps due to earlier bugs I experienced before).
If it doesn’t work out the way I want it to, I may try another modern WordPress theme that is more flexible and also includes post formats.
Update: While the Twenty Twenty-Five theme is a vast improvement over previous themes, the poor usability especially within the Site Editor is still holding me back from fully embracing it and using it. So for now, I’m sticking with the Twenty Twenty theme which I still find immensely usable, especially when combined with the Twentig plugin. To get post format compatibility, I just added some PHP code to enable it within the theme.
