Well you learn something new everyday, sometimes two things! Looks like my #2 request above is actually already here, just not by defaultā¦
Asset Manager Based Upon a Finder Folder
To make this happen you need toā¦
Go to your Project Settings
Go to the General tab (you should actually land here)
Uncheck āEmbed Assets in Project Fileā at the bottom of the window
Close the Project Settings window
Open the Asset Manager
Drag and drop the assets from a Finder window to the Asset Manager window to replace the embedded assets and turn them into linked assets. At this point all of the assets should have a small link icon in the upper left of each image in the Asset Manager.
Things seemed okay initially but after I reloaded the project, all of my images were gone within each page of my project as the embedded assets were no more. I had to relink each image to the new linked assets in the Asset Manager.
A nice side effect to all of this is when youāre in the Asset Manager youāll now have āRefresh Assetā and āShow in Finderā context menus when you right click on an image.
Hereās the other thing I learned regarding my prior commentā¦
āAs it stands right now, itās a bit of a PITA to drag-and-drop into the Asset Manager window as it hides itself when Blocs goes into the background.ā
To remedy this situation you can change a Blocs preferenceā¦
Open the Blocs Preferences
Go to the General tab (you should actually land here)
Check āShow sub-windows when app not activeā at the bottom of the window
Documenting all of this here to help others either today, or into the future.
Features that I would love to have, that would truly expand the capabilities of Blocs for Wordpress is:
I would be great if we could assign a shortcode to a bloc in the Blocs project when designing a WP Theme. Then when the theme was exported, that shortcode would be available in Wordpress, and could placed in a page, post, custom postā¦etc in Wordpress, and that bloc would be displayed in that page or post. That would be a fantastic feature. For example, one of the Wordpress pages could be ātheme blocsā or ācomponentsā. This āpageā wouldnāt be real pages, but an area where one could create exportable bloc components that be use to create new layout in pages or posts.
OrderBy filter in the post loop (I already had mentioned in a previous topic).
Cheers,
Ricardo
EDIT: the export could also be a WP Block and or shortcode. Now the exported theme would have additional components available directly in the published theme.
I want navigation styling to be a lot more robust.
Expectation:
Easily detectable classes (visible in UI, at least in settings) for āNavigation Linkā and āActive page Navigation Linkā. When styled, the Active link should override all settings of the Navigation Link. I want full control of background color, text color, element padding, and element border-radius.
As it is now, even if we set .navbar-nav li a and .active they are fighting each other and are already relying on āimportant!ā which seems like a bit of a hack. On top of this, when toggling āimportant!ā on and off while trying to micro-manage it, we keep running into other competing classes like the general āaā styling and .navbar a and so on.
Website navigation is very present and forward-facing. I think it should be simpler to implementāespecially if Blocs wants to cater to āno code enthusiastsā. And we keep getting recurring threads on the topic as proof of that.
If this is NOT an issue, Iād be happy to be schooled on a two-class approach that lets āactiveā override ānavbar-nav li aā, when background and text color is different for both elements. The main culprit seems to be that unchecking āimportantā for ānavbar-nav li aāā text-color (i.e. color) the text color defined in ānavbar-nav li aāā is no longer respected but falls back to other Bootstrap classes mentioned above (please tell me Iām wrong here). If I keep āimportantā on, then ānavbar-nav li aāā overrides the āimportantā in āactiveā (only text color, not background).
Itās possible I fumbled my way around the obvious solution, but it should be more straight forward than this.
Agreed @Pixla. Some people on the forum seem to have no problems with the navbar, but I find it a constant battle. Maybe because Iām not a regular user of Blocs, so forget bits, but some noticeable classes would be a great help.
Effortlessly add icons to the center of your videos, smoothly adjust the color of icons or image, and conveniently play videos without having to tinker with control settings or display options.
One-click functionality for playing and pausing videos related to icon or image.
Carousel:
Enhanced features for the carousel, providing more advanced options.
Control the positioning of images in the background: center, right, or left.
Enhance the background of images in makeup, adjusting opacity and adding color overlays.
Incorporate various carousel styles for images.
Enhance the slideshow by making it responsive, ensuring that the margin of the background image reduces in size and text and buttons are properly spaced.
Accordion management style
The heading line can be easily changed by adding an icon or image. It is also convenient to modify the heading line into a dropdown menu for adjusting the size or color of the products.
Please let me know your thoughts on these features.
1 - Development of the Header section
When a new slide is added, add it at the beginning (Other slides will automatically advance with the contents of the 2nd, 3rd, 4th ā¦)
More advanced features can be added
2 - CSS grid module
3 - New effects can be added to the animation section
Give us an overhaul on the preview options, so Blocs can operate the way that Solis was intended and ideally so that we can have the the editing canvas on one display with the preview on another and watch live updates as we edit across different device types, both vertically and horizontally. This was my big wish for Blocs 5 that never happened and would massively speed up development times.
I agree with @Eldar and adding missing properties such as The object-fit and object-position properties.
The layout tree should also be more robust and reliable. I spend much time to try to select an object that I duplicated in the design canvas and donāt display in the layout tree. I usually have to switch to another page and come back to see and select my bric in the tree.
An Insert for non-breaking space[ ] in text format, context menu or else would be of great help.
No later than today, I wanted to add for a phone number in a label of a button. You wonāt believe me but my button displayed 022&733 (maybe I typed it wrong or it stripped nbsp;) and I was never able to change the label afterwards. Whatever I typed, wether delete, enter or typed any other text, the label never changed on the canvas and preview. I had to remove the button and recreate one from scratch.
And I donāt even mention crashes! Iām using many apps, just to mention Adobe CC and lots of others, but I donāt have as much crash as with Blocs. Which make me think: a feature to auto-save permanently, thatās take a snapshot of the project when it crash .
Well, just to say that Blocs is a great app but there is room for improvements and stability and it should be a priority over new features. Same as in MacOS: Sonoma as not much new features but they did a good job for making the system more robust and stable.
From a developer perspective, Sonoma has been the worst version yet for causing bugs. The issues with bounds alone has caused havoc across the entire Blocs interface. If youāre noticing stability issues, itās likely caused by Sonoma.
We could spend all year patching ever tiny issue, but the moment you upgrade to the next OS in September, there is always the possibility of new problems. Itās never ending unfortunately.
Itās a bizarre stage in the history of the Mac with Intel and Apple silicon and compiling for both. I think things will settle once Apple drop intel in the next few years.
But of course stability is always something we strive to improve every year.
Itās also worth noting there are some here at the forum, that will complain about bugs and stability but send DMās to me with feature requests and push for new features. Those voices donāt have any influence on the future of Blocs now.
Regarding auto save, Iām noticing that Blocs will occasionally auto save, but itās hugely annoying. If Iām typing in text and it decides to auto save, the auto save takes over focus and your text entry ceases.
It would be great if future versions of Blocs could auto save but do so without taking focus.
As Iām not a Mac app developer, I did not realized the difficulties you might encounter @Norm with new OS release. Good point to mention.
Nevertheless, from a user perspective, I had no notable bugs since I upgraded to Sonoma. It even resolved some problems I had I could never worked out before. Note that Blocs has been crashing from time to time or does not respond as expected ā especially with the layout tree ā also with previous Mac OS versions.
Itās not that bad though as Iām still using (and loving) Blocs
As someone said above, features come with custom brics. So if Blocs get stronger for Brics developers, we might see more and more features coming. Thatās the no-coding features maybe some expect.
Woops, typed a bit too quick there and a word got lost there. My apologies.
I meant:
āAllow (custom) brics to use WordPress data as a data source.ā
Let me give you an example:
Weāve already got great brics to build awesome layouts, for example the āmasonry gridā. How cool would it be to set the data source of that bric to the populate it with the post loop or just the content of a custom content type.
Or to apply the post loop to the Carrousel bric. That would make an awesome addition and could help us build even more dynamic pages.
Iāve got one more for you @Norm. It would be tremendously helpful to make the Page Settings dialog not be so strictly modal and tied to the current page.
Iād like to be able to change pages (e.g. CMD+[ & CMD+]) and have the Page Settings dialog automatically update. As it stands right now, you need to close the dialog, change pages, and then bring the dialog back up. Alternatively, maybe some < and > buttons would be helpful on the dialog like Music (aka iTunes) has when editing a songās metadata.
Root cause is that Iām often finding myself adjusting page settings and doing so across many or all of my pages and as it stands today, this is really high effort due to the way the Page Settings dialog is built/interacts within Blocs.
@Norm Okay, Iāll add one more of my pet peeves. Maybe this is just a bug, but Blocs has a real hard time with spelling and grammar checking via the normal macOS methodologies. Sometimes it will properly underline a word (red for spelling, blueish green IIRC for grammar), but a majority of the time it does not.
Iām finding that my best workaround at the moment is to copy text out of Blocs to any other text editor within macOS to do spelling and grammar checking, then move the text back into Blocs.
Looks like my #2 request above is actually already here, just not by defaultā¦
