If you regularly develop custom coding blocks for individual client websites, what kind of blocks are you creating?
I’m asking because most of the examples I’ve been finding for custom blocks are just to add, save, and display missing capabilities that all core blocks should already have baked in. But don’t. Usually they’re just about overriding hard-coded assumptions about how blocks should look on the front end.
The team that built the new WordPress.org homepage said
> The plan for the new theme is that as much as possible of the content and page layout will be created and managed using the editor, as opposed to code in Subversion. Other than the header and footer, almost everything you see on the front page of the staging site is the contents of a page, edited with Gutenberg.
That’s pretty cool but then they added…
> Implementing the full design will require building some custom blocks and customizing existing core blocks.
>Source:
If you look at the actual WordPress.org homepage it’s… pretty basic. Matt Mullenweg flamed them in a comment for taking 30 days to build the page. He said you could do it in a day with Wix! I’d say you could do it in half a day with an HTML editor like Dreamweaver. Or the old-school Classic Editor and CSS. You could also build it in an hour or two with any of the modern page builders, none of which would require firing up a dev stack to write custom modules or override existing ones.
So if you’re writing blocks are they workarounds like the WordPress.org team did or are you adding distinct and unique functionality?
It’s a combination of custom blocks and core blocks. With the correct styling, the core blocks (especially the group, column, and row blocks) can construct a lot of standard page elements that make up much of the meat of pages.
However I always write custom themes for my clients, so they are paying for a custom design that skins the core blocks AND provides a suite of 10 or 12 custom blocks that do special things as dictated by their designs (slideshows, grids that pull specific queries of custom posts, calls to action with unique layouts, accordions, etc). The WP team is full of shit if they argue that you can build the sort of theme a company expects when they’re paying 20/50k for a custom design: you simply can’t do that with just the core blocks and some styling.
In fact, while I am a proponent of Gutenberg in general, the approach to FSE I think is fundamentally flawed when it comes to the sort of sites corporate clients are expecting after a custom design process. They don’t want to piece every aspect of their site together from blocks. They want a handful of templates, a solid frame around it for navs, a custom library of custom blocks, and a tightly styled library of core blocks so they don’t have to be designers when they create content for their site. FSE forces regular users to behave as designers, which is fucking stupid.