Bug/UX Issue with Font Library and Create Block Theme Legacy Plugin

[daviesmediadesign]

What Users Expect

Installing and activating custom or third-party fonts in WordPress 6.5 nominally requires navigating to the Site Editor, the Styles tab, Typography, then "Manage Fonts" next to the Fonts subheading. The user can then, of course, upload fonts or link to Google fonts, save the changes, and the new fonts are available for their site i.e. to use universally in headings, text.

What Actually Happens to Legacy Create Block Theme Plugin Users

However, if the user at any point has installed and used the legacy Create Block Theme plugin to add fonts to their site, they have to take the additional step (which is not entirely obvious) of ensuring the latest version of Create Block Theme is still installed and activated on their site, navigating to the "Create Block Theme" icon in their Block Toolbar, clicking "Save changes to theme," then clicking "Save changes" again. If the user doesn't do this, the fonts they thought were installed on their site won't display properly on any of their webpages (though at first there's a glitch that makes it appear as if the font is installed and displaying within the block editor, with the font name even showing up on inspection within the developer tools on the webpage itself, but saving/refreshing the page or viewing the live site creates a bug where the actual font isn't properly displayed).

What May Be Causing This Issue

I have a feeling this is occurring because there's some kind of data left behind by the legacy Create Block Theme plugin on the user's site. Another theory is something is off with writing to the theme.json file. I say this because any new sites I create that have not used this plugin prior to WordPress 6.5 don't have this issue (custom fonts are added in the expected way, by simply adding and saving fonts through the Font Library window), whereas all websites that have used the legacy plugin at any point do experience this issue.

Proposed Remedy/Solution

I wrote an article outlining the problem and solution on my site (not trying to plug my site, just providing more information for those who don't fully understand the issue). I believe this is a bug that should be remedied as the UX is confusing/unintuitive and it's not clear that prior users of the Create Block Theme plugin need to continue to go through this plugin to get proper functionality of fonts.

Perhaps one fix is to include the option to delete all plugin data when a user is deleting the Create Block Theme plugin from their site (since WordPress 6.5 purports to replace the need for this plugin with its new built-in functionality)? Not sure if this would totally fix the issue, but I have a feeling it might.