Do I understand correctly that this scope does not include a plan for allowing block themes to work without Gutenberg even in 5.9?
And I mean block themes not "site editor".

They will work once the remaining infrastructure pieces and dependencies (missing blocks) are included even without the theme editor.

The theme editor is what WordPress calls the built in file editor in the WordPress admin area,. Please help me understand what part that editor plays in whether or not a block theme/ full site editing theme can be activated.

Sorry, I was using "theme editor" to mean "site editor" in the above (the block editor that is able to edit all templates of a theme). The current built in file editor would still be there for any kind of theme, though it remains to be seen if it's de-emphasized in the block theme case given you still hace access to all files, provided it's not mixing php files with html templates.

Update: broke design tools into its sub-tracking issue at #33447.

Update: added "focused template part" mode as a separate item under Template Editor #33926.

Update: added "A lighter Navigation Block Experience" as a complement to the existing Navigation Block Tracking Issue #34041

Update: added "The Global Styles Interface" to the styling milestone #34574.

Hi, Is there a plan for category pages etc to be fully editable with blocks like any other page? This would be brilliant for woocommerce. There are some hacky ways round it at the moment, using redirects to replace category pages with normal pages etc, or using canonical url and linking from the menu, but it feels like a huge seo risk to start messing with my site structure this way. I'm wondering how much more research and effort i should put into this, with the way wordpress is going maybe this will be resolved in a year or so?

@gingerling with block themes you'd indeed be able to edit category templates, either globally, or for a specific category:

@gingerling with block themes you'd indeed be able to edit category templates, either globally, or for a specific category:

Sounds great. Forgive my ignorance, is this available now? Or is this in the works? Is there a roadmap with expected release if so? Thanks for your help!

@gingerling the above is available in the Gutenberg plugin paired with a block theme. It's currently targeted for inclusion in WP 5.9.

@gingerling the above is available in the Gutenberg plugin paired with a block theme. It's currently targeted for inclusion in WP 5.9.

Thank you this is great, I'm planning now to wait for this feature rather than work around it. I'm hoping to be able to work on testing for storefront if it will be incorporating this block theme approach. Really impressed with wordpress development speed and direction right now.