This is my truth for 2026, I think. Maybe the strongest aspect of WordPress in this moment is the ability to group blocks together into patterns that can be stored, shared, reused, and all the while these patterns can seamlessly inherit site configurations like typefaces and color palettes.
For most people, the best way to put a new website together is to work with a coordinated set of patterns. This way, design consistency is effortlessly maintained and there aren’t the opportunities for broken and just-plain-lousy assemblies of random single blocks.
I was already headed in this direction, but what really crystallized my understanding of the strength of patterns was working with the Ollie Pro theme. There are basically three themes bound up as one within the Ollie theme an what differentiates the three is that they are built mostly from different groups of patterns.
As it happens, it looks reasonably good to intermix the pattern sets, but if you were to build the Ollie theme without pattern groups, you’d most likely wind up building three separate themes.
At risk of sounding like an Ollie fanboy (though, honestly, I might be one… sue me), one great thing Ollie Pro adds to the mix is a modal interface for displaying a large, web-hosted group of insertable patterns. The pattern selection interface in core WordPress isn’t unusable by any stretch, but things get clunky if you have more than a handful of patterns in play. And as the Ollie Duo adds new patterns, the value of Ollie Pro grows.
One of the next items on PeakZebra’s agenda is to build our own version of this sort of “pattern picker” modal interface. We’ve got some other pattern-related additions in the works as well. A theme, in our view, is a set of patterns.