Just curious as to how many of you are using Blocs as a template builder for Wordpress. I understand there are amazing capabilities, but wondered if many people were really using them?
The post is based on pure curiosity.
I have no idea on total numbers. Personally I only built one WordPress site using a Blocs created theme very early on and it was embarrassingly bad. Apart from my near total lack of knowledge with WordPress, the bigger issue at the time was Gutenberg, which seemed horribly limited compared to Blocs and I found it all quite exasperating.
A few months back I was in touch with @brechtryckaert who tells me that Gutenberg Blocks has improved dramatically in the last couple of years. I gather it can do 90% of what the page builders can do without many of their associated downsides. This is quite a good channel on Youtube to pick up tips.
Learning WordPress properly is basically on my to do list. Given the massive range of plugins and flexibility I don’t think it is wise to ignore entirely, unless you have very specific requirements and you are certain they can be done in Blocs. If you are developer, not having the ability to produce WordPress websites is limiting your options.
In theory, the combination of Blocs with WordPress Gutenberg should be pretty good by now.
It has come quite a way and is now at a level where I’m comfortable of having my customers using it.
Also, with Blocs 5 we got the introduction of Customizer settings for WordPress themes, which tremendously increase the possibilities.
Copy pasting from the beta-testing docs:
Customizer Items
In Blocs V5 the Wordpress Data Manager now enables developers to add Wordpress customizer data items. These items can be used to enable portions of a theme to be customised from the Wordpress backend. A range of customizer items are supported including image wells, text fields and date fields. When a customizer data item is created, it will show up in the text/image data source dropdown lists, which means you can set it to provide content for a specific part of the theme UI.
Customizer Colour
Colour customizer controls can now be enabled in Project Settings (under the Wordpress tab). When enabled a specific range of global colours will be editable via the Wordpress customizer backend.
By default the theme background colour option will be enable when colour customizer controls are enabled in Project Settings. Blocs will also include Global Swatches (if they are named) primary, primary variant, secondary and secondary variant as editable colours via the Wordpress customizer. If a Wordpress theme is designed in Blocs to take advantage of the new improvements in Global Swatches, its now possible to customise a themes colour scheme via the Wordpress backend.
Customizer Toggle Visibility
When creating a Wordpress theme with Blocs, it’s now possible to apply Wordpress customizer visibility toggling to any Bloc section. This means you can create themes that have content areas that can be easily enabled/disabled from the Wordpress backend.
When a Bloc is selected, a new Wordpress section is available in the inspector to control this functionality.
I didn’t see this in the knowledge base just yet, hence the copy-paste above. This will change a lot for development of WordPress themes in Blocs Plus (5)
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I am having a difficult time trying to get the connection using Blocs and WordPress. To me there are so many things you can do with a Bootstrap (html and scrips) designed and managed sources, than you can do with WP. To much to get into here. I feel I must mention the cost of plug-ins can drain your financial resources. Blocs and 3rd party tools on the other hand cost little in comparison. Yes, there are limitations on both sides. Even though, I use Elementor Pro, when I am called upon to do so. For me, I choose Blocs over any other web design app.
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Does anyone have a Blocs/Wordpress site that uses WooCommerce? How easy was it to get set up?