Show IH: My latest project is launched. A WordPress plugin for building custom Gutenberg blocks.
Been building this for a while now with a few mates and we've just launched on the WordPress plugin repo.
If you follow WordPress news at all, you'll be familiar with the "Gutenberg" project. Basically a complete overhaul of the WordPress editing experience. For a CMS that runs 30% of the web, it's a big deal.
One of the headaches for WordPress devs is that developing for Gutenberg is very different to classic WordPress dev. There is a big barrier to entry.
Block Lab is about lowering this barrier and making it as easy as possible for WordPress devs to start working with Gutenberg. WordPress has thrived on how accessible it is. With Block Lab we hope to make the new editor accessible for devs.
Anyway, super excited! This is only day 1. Now on to day 2!
This kinda stuff makes me really excited for Gutenberg. Watching the video on youtube now, I like the file structure and template use. Can't wait to dive in on my own and hopefully give you some more feedback.
I haven't gone all the way through it yet but I saw the fields and heard you mention you'll be adding more just curious what your thoughts are on something like a repeater field? Is that in the works or is it maybe not relevant with the Gutenberg setup?
Thanks for sharing!
The repeater field is certainly on our radar.
We're also going to look at:
So quite a bit more coming. :)
Just finished the youtube video;
Questions I have remaining are:
Do the inline styles apply inside the Gutenberg editor now?
Can you use the external sheet and are those applied in the editor (probably less of chance)?
And, I these are the important steps to demonstrate on the homepage, just IMHO 1) make a custom block, 2) enter content into custom block, 3) preview custom block in Gutenberg (easy for clients to use), 4) that same preview shows on the theme itself
For me as a web developer for a digital agency, those are my concerns. Anything I can do to help our customers feel like bad asses when it comes to using the themes we build them, and block lab looks like it'll help that. Hope the feedback helps, good luck and thanks again.
Inline styles are visible in the Gutenberg editor. Anything in the template file gets passed through. The video doesn't show this, but it does. (might to a re-recording to include it).
Styles outside of the template file don't however. This is a standard limitation of the WP Admin which doesn't load theme styles by default.
We're looking at how we can work with/around this.
One current option though is the ability to create a "Preview" template for a block. This is what gets loaded in Gutenberg and is prioritised, in GB, over the template that is rendered on the front end. It's not something you'd use all the time, but if your styling for the block was in the theme CSS, you could use the Preview template, with inline CSS, as an option for the GB editor.
It's not a perfect solution, but something we'll refine in future releases.
Docs are here if you wanted to dig in further as well.
https://github.com/getblocklab/block-lab/wiki
Really appreciate the feedback mate! :). Hope the plugin helps you out as Gutenberg roles in.