#11 – Vinny McKee on His Block Builder Plugin

About this episode.

On the podcast today we have Vinny McKee.

He’s the creator of the Wicked Block Builder plugin, which is a tool to make the job of creating your own custom blocks as easy as possible.

I’m sure that you know that WordPress’ editor is all about blocks. You can create content, and now whole websites with small components. A title here, and a paragraph there. But the real power of blocks is the way that they can be extended so that they can consume and display any kind of content in any way that you can imagine.

The WordPress landscape is moving towards blocks as the way to create and present all-the-things, and we’re just at the start of a very exciting journey.

You can download and try out blocks for almost everything. Some do one thing, other block packs bring entire suites of interesting blocks to the table.

But there is a problem… blocks are not all that easy to create. Yes, you might very well be a talented developer who has taken the lead in learning block creation. You burned the midnight oil and got your head around the complexities of it all. I suspect that it was an uphill struggle.

But WordPress’ mission is to democratise publishing. In an ideal world not just publishing, but extending WordPress would be something available to the masses.

Step in Vinny McKee. His Wicked Block Builder plugin is one of the tools out there that enables you to build your own blocks without the need to understand much of what’s going on behind the scenes, and there’s a lot going on behind the scenes.

Page Builders allowed users to create beautiful websites without needing to learn code, block builders are doing the same thing for blocks.

Today on the podcast we learn about why Vinny built the plugin, as well as how it works. What problems does it overcome, and are there any limitations to what you can build?

Useful links.

Wicked Block Builder on the WordPress repo

Wicked Block Builder website

Justin Tadlock’s post “Wicked Plugins Launches UI-Based WordPress Block Builder”

Wicked Plugins Twitter account

Transcript

[00:00:00] Nathan Wrigley: Welcome to the 11th edition of the Jukebox podcast from WP Tavern. My name is Nathan Wrigley. Jukebox is a podcast which is dedicated to all things WordPress, the people, the events, the plugins, the themes, and in this case, the creation of blocks with a plugin. Up until now, we’ve released this podcast each month. But we’re going to move to a weekly schedule from now on. And that leads to a couple of things. Firstly, it goes without saying that there will be lots more podcast episodes, and I would encourage you to subscribe to the podcast so that you can get all of those episodes automatically each and every week. You can do that by searching for WP Tavern in your podcast, player of choice, or by going to wptavern dot com forward slash feed forward slash podcast, and you can copy that URL into most podcast players. Secondly, with so many more episodes, I’d really like to hear from anyone out there who would like to come on the podcast and talk about whatever it is that you do with WordPress. It might be that you’re a developer, a WordCamp organizer, a contributor, a designer, honestly… if it’s about WordPress, I’m keen to hear from you and hopefully get you on the show. Head over to wptavern dot com forward slash contact forward slash jukebox, and use the form there. Once again, wptavern dot com forward slash contact forward slash jukebox. And I look forward to hearing from you.

So on the podcast today, we have Vinny McKee. He’s the creator of the Wicked Block Builder plugin, which is a tool to make the job of creating your own custom blocks, as easy as possible. I’m sure that you know, that the WordPress editor is all about blocks. You can create content and now whole websites with small components, a title here, and a paragraph there.

But the real power of blocks is the way that they can be extended so that they can consume and display any kind of content in any way that you can imagine. The WordPress landscape is moving towards blocks as the way to create and present all the things, and we’re just at the start of this very exciting journey. You can download and try out blocks for almost everything. Some do one thing. Other block packs bring entire suites of interesting blocks to the table. But there’s a problem. Blocks are not all that easy to create. Yes, you might very well be a talented developer who has taken the lead in learning block creation. You burned the midnight oil and got your head around all the complexities. I suspect that it was an uphill struggle. But WordPress’ is mission is to democratize publishing. In an ideal world, not just publishing, but extending WordPress would be something available to the masses. Step in Vinny McKee. His Wicked Block Builder plugin is one of the tools out there that enables you to build your own blocks without the need to understand much of what’s going on behind the scenes. And there’s a lot going on behind the scenes.

Page builders allowed users to create beautiful websites without needing to learn code. Block builders, well they’re doing the same thing for blocks. Today on the podcast we learn about why Vinny built the plugin as well as how it works. What problems does it overcome? And are there any limitations to what you can build? If you’re interested in trying it out, you can find the links in the show notes, head over to wptavern dot com forward slash podcast, and look for episode number 11. And so without further delay, I bring you Vinny McKee.

I am joined on the podcast today by Vinny McKee. Hello Vinny.

[00:04:40] Vinny McKee: Hey, Nathan. Thanks for having me on the podcast.

[00:04:42] Nathan Wrigley: You are most welcome. Now, Vinny is going to be talking to us today around the Gutenberg subject is the best way to describe it and blocks in particular. He has a great deal of expertise in this area and has a plugin which may be of real interest to the people who are listening to this podcast.

This whole episode really was brought to my attention by Justin Tadlock, who on the 14th of January, 2022, wrote a piece called Wicked Plugins Launches UI Based WordPress Block Builder. So be sure to go and check that out. So I asked Vinny if he wanted to come onto the podcast today and here we go.

We’re going to be talking about blocks and building blocks. First question though Vinny, if it’s all right with you, I’m going to ask a more generic question. Would you mind just telling us a little bit about yourself, your history with WordPress and so on.

[00:05:33] Vinny McKee: Yeah. So I’m a freelance web developer and plugin author. I’ve been a freelance developer since around 2006. And I think the first time I really started using WordPress was actually in 2006. At that time, I didn’t really know anything about it really. And to be honest, didn’t even really care that much about it at the time. It was just a way to solve what I needed at the time, which was two blogs for clients so that they could easily create blog posts.

And so then I think it was probably around maybe 2008 or 2009, if I have my timing correct, when I really started using WordPress more and started to build lightweight sites that used it more as a CMS and started to build custom themes for it and everything. And then of course, fast forward to today and I’m using WordPress almost exclusively for all of the clients sites I built or build.

[00:06:27] Nathan Wrigley: Where are you based?

[00:06:28] Vinny McKee: I am based in Seattle, Washington.

[00:06:31] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. So we’re probably going to be talking today around the block builder plugin that you’ve got, and probably it’s going to be the easiest thing to just mention where that URL is right at the start. So the company is called wicked plugins, and you can find wickedplugins dot com easily enough, and from there, you’re going to be searching around for wicked block builder that will enable you to see what we’re talking about today. There’s also a wordpress dot org version. And obviously that’s over at wordpress dot org forward slash plugins forward slash Wicked Block Builder. Each of those words is hyphenated. I will put those links into the show notes and anything else that we discussed today that comes up, I’ll endeavor to put those into the show notes as well.

Tell us why you decided to put all of your bits and pieces into blocks. I know that for many people, this is clearly the future. There’s a lot of interest in this, especially right now. But a lot of people are staying away from it at the same time. What is it that you saw all those months, years ago that made you endeavor to build this solution?

[00:07:35] Vinny McKee: Yeah, I think it’s similar to what WordPress has been great for a long time, which is extensibility. So I think what’s really cool about blocks and what I like about it is that you can extend the block editor by creating your own blocks. And so that gives you a lot of freedom. It gives you the ability to create blocks that are tailored to individual projects. And I think that’s really useful. And I think that’s one area where it stands apart from other ways that you can build a site with maybe a page builder or something.

I know you can extend other page builders as well, but I feel like with blocks and Gutenberg, I like that it’s baked directly into WordPress. And I just think that it’s neat that you can extend it just like you can extend WordPress in other ways.

[00:08:23] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. I guess the page builder analogy is quite a good one in that if you are a heavy user of a particular page builder, you may well be interested in creating the equivalent of blocks. So app like functionality within that particular page builder. But the issue I suppose there is that it will be confined to that page builder, and so the audience potentially may be limited. Whereas the block based initiative enables everybody with the default install of WordPress to manage to do these bits and pieces.

Yeah. So really nice inspiration. So why did you decide to actually put your elbow to the metal as it were and get stuck into this. It seems that this is a problem of building blocks. It’s tremendously difficult if you’ve never done this before, but equally you could have just sat there and waited for somebody else to build a solution or indeed for that to be no solution at all. What compelled you to create a sort of GUI interface in order to assist people who have the challenge of building their own custom blocks?

[00:09:22] Vinny McKee: Yeah. So what happened is, as I started to use the block editor to build sites for clients, I found myself wanting to create my own blocks. And because I felt that I needed to do that in order to achieve the look and feel and layout and functionality that the designers I was working with wanted for their sites. And so, I felt like I needed to create my own blocks in order to have the control I wanted over the markup and to achieve all those things as far as the look and feel and layout and those types of things. So what I did is I started creating blocks for the sites that I was working on. But what I found is, as I was going through and creating these blocks, I noticed a few things.

One is that, so when you create a block, blocks have two different functions to generate their markup. There’s one called the edit function, which generates the markup that you see for the block when you edit a page and you see your block in the editor. And then, blocks also have what’s called a save function, which is responsible for generating the markup that actually gets saved to the database when you save a page, and then that’s what you see on the front end when you view the page. And so if you want your blocks to look the same in the editor, as they do on the front end and vice versa, which is what I wanted, you have to basically code the block twice. And, you know, even if the markup is almost identical for both views.

And so that was one thing where I noticed it was a duplication of effort and took a little bit of extra time. And even if you want the block to look exactly the same in both of those views, you have to tweak the code slightly. You can’t just copy and paste. And so it ends up being a lot of… it can be a lot of work.

Something else I noticed was that I was spending a lot of time referencing documentation as I was building blocks. So even after I learned how to build blocks, was was still looking at the documentation a lot, because I couldn’t remember things like, okay, what is that control named? If I wanted to add a text field to a block, for example, is that called text control or is that called text field?

And then I would always forget like what attributes those components or controls accepted. So for example, when I would add a drop down to a block, I would forget what the attributes that allowed you to set the options was called options, or was it called choices? And then how did, how did the data needed to be formatted to go into those options?

Things like that. So I still had to spend a lot of time looking at the documentation, even though I had learned how to build blocks. I kept running into design patterns that were hard. So for example, if I wanted to add an arbitrary number of items to a block, something that would be good for a repeater, for example, like adding an arbitrary number of images, or if you wanted to create like a team block that displayed a grid of people where you could sort the people in the block that would take awhile and it was hard to do.

I guess what I’m trying to say is that what I found was there a lot of things that were adding up to take a significant amount of time, and I just felt I needed to create these blocks for these in order to build the sites that I wanted, but that it was too time consuming for it to be economical. And that I just felt like I wouldn’t be able to produce these sites without being able to build these blocks faster.

[00:12:27] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. This is the problem that we hear about so much is that the move over to blocks really does create a technical debt, really. What I mean by that is, it’s difficult. There’s a new, whole new raft of things that must be learnt, new techniques that need to be acquired, whole systems that you need to put in place in terms of software as well and what have you. And I feel that a lot of people are put off just by this problem. They simply don’t have the time. They’re working. They’re busy. They’re building websites, possibly for clients or what have you. And the time to go out and spend learning is simply not available to them, and obviously in your case, you managed to find that time and create that bridge for yourself and make it happen.

Was that a difficult journey? So going from no blocks, several years ago to the ability to now create not only blocks, but software, which builds blocks. Did you find that journey fraught with difficulty? Was it fairly straightforward? What was your impression?

[00:13:24] Vinny McKee: Yeah, for me, it was actually fairly difficult because prior to Gutenberg, I didn’t really have a lot of experience with React and I didn’t have a lot of experience with a lot of the tooling either that you would use in a React project. So for example, NPM, Webpack, and some of the other tools that we use to maybe set up a React project. I’d worked with it just a little bit before Gutenberg, but not much. And yeah, I didn’t have that much experience with it, and to be honest, I was pretty intimidated by it because that just wasn’t something that I was familiar with.

And so it did take me quite a while to figure out how to learn React of course, but then also I think for me, what was even more challenging was some of the command line stuff and configuration stuff. Setting up Webpack, for example, to be able to compile the project. And I know now there’s ways you can use other tools like WP Scripts.

I also wanted to understand for myself, make it easier, but yeah, at the time, I also wanted to understand for myself, you know, how those things worked, but yeah, it was a challenge. And even today there’ll be weeks where I might spend hours trying to solve a configuration issue with Webpack. Yeah, it was definitely challenging.

[00:14:37] Nathan Wrigley: I think that’s a really valid point. This is not something which is going to be for everybody. If you are of a certain mindset and you have the time available and possibly the skills available, this might be open to you. And then of course, there’s the other people who presumably you’ve built your Wicked Block Builder for, is the crowd of people who perhaps don’t want to go through all of those steps, learning all of those different things. You mentioned React and the build process and all of that. They just simply don’t want to do that. But they would like to dabble in creating blocks, either for themselves, or for their clients. And I guess that’s the tool that you’ve built. Have I got your target audience about right there? Is it people who are keen to build blocks, but don’t really wish to do the learning that might be required if you wanted to do it all by hand, if you know what I mean?

[00:15:28] Vinny McKee: Yeah. I think that’s a big part of it. And that was certainly one issue I was trying to solve was to make the barrier to entry much lower. But I think too, I was also, the main reason I was inspired to build it was actually to save myself time. Even as a developer, I wanted a way to be able to build blocks faster.

And so, yeah, I mean, it’s definitely for people that maybe don’t want to learn React, or set up the tools needed to build blocks from scratch. I also aimed it at developers as well, hopefully make their lives easier and make it much more efficient to create blocks so that when you’re working on a client project, you can spend less time working on some of those other things I mentioned earlier and focusing more on just creating the blocks you need.

[00:16:12] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. Let’s dig into the tool. It is a plugin for WordPress. As we mentioned at the top of the show, it’s available in a free version on the repo and also a commercial version over on the website, which I’ll link in the show notes so that anybody who doesn’t want to hear the URL in the podcast can just find it, but would you just at the outset, just describe the main differences between the free and the pro so that everybody is really clear where that boundary lies.

[00:16:40] Vinny McKee: They’re exactly the same. The only difference is that the pro version has a couple of advanced features. And so the main features that one has, is a repeater component that allows you to add repeating items to a block as well as conditional logic. And then it has a couple of other advanced components as well. But for the most part, the free version has almost everything and you can actually build the exact same blocks.

The only difference would be something maybe like a repeater where if you wanted to have an arbitrary number of links in a block with the free version you had maybe add slots for five links to your block or something. Whereas with the pro version, you could use a repeater so that you can add an arbitrary number of items or links the block.

[00:17:21] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. Got it. Thank you. That’s made it really clear. Okay. So we’re going to try to describe, cause it’s a difficult thing trying to describe what is a graphical user interface on a podcast, but we’ll give it our best go. As with all things plugin, you must install it on your website. And then you’re presented with a range of new menus in the admin area.

Wicked Block Builder is what I’m seeing currently. And you have the option to add new. And the intention is that you go through the tool and at the end of it, when you go to a post or a page, And you click the little inserter, the plus button, you will hopefully have yourself a ready-made block available to be used to put whatever kind of custom data it is that you want to display on your website.

So, with all that in mind, do you want to try, you know the tool far better than I, I’ve really had just the briefest of plays, but did you want to just describe the process that you would go to in order to set up a simple block with some simple attributes and just discuss what kind of things we’re doing.

[00:18:21] Vinny McKee: Sure. Yeah, I’ll do my best. Yeah. Like you said, once you install the plugin, then to create a block, you just go to Wicked Block Builder in your admin menu, and there’s an add new option. So you click add new. And what that does is that opens up the block builder tool, which is just an interface within WordPress that lets you create your block.

And so that tool is organized into six main screens. And so what you see first is the setting screen and the settings screen just lets you enter basic information about your block and configure some things. So for example, you can enter the name of your block. You can give it a description that you can choose, like what alignment options it supports and whether or not you’d like to make it dynamic.

So then the next screen is attributes. And so the attributes screen lets you configure the attributes for your block. And if you haven’t worked with blocks before then, what attributes are a way to store and, or extract data from your blocks. So they kind of hold the data that’s for your block. And so once you configure attributes, which to configure attributes, it’s really just a matter of dragging and dropping an attribute type, a type, meaning like the data type that you want that attribute to store.

So that could be like a string, for example, or, a true false value or a number and array as the other type of attribute. So once you’ve got your attributes added to your block, then the next screen is called the editor view. And like I was talking about before, there’s two views, two blocks, there’s the edit view, which is what you see in the block editor. And then there’s the front end view. In this plugin we start with the editor view and on that screen, what you do, that’s the kind of the meat of it and where you really build the block. And you build your block by dragging and dropping HTML elements and components. So components are things like text fields or drop downs or radio buttons or check boxes or color pickers, anything that you want to add to your block, to allow people to interact with it, to change settings or to input content.

And so what you do is you drag the HTML elements that you want. So like a div tag, for example, if you want your block to be a div and then maybe if you want another div nested inside of it, you would drag another div and nest it inside the first div. And then if you want a rich text control to be able to input some texts, you would drag that inside. You know, one of the divs, but the idea is that you have full control over the markup and, you create the markup however you want by dragging and dropping. And there’s no limits to, you know, what markup you can add that you can put any valid tags in. So what that does is create the editor view and then the next screen is the front end view.

So you have the option of building the output that your block will generate when it gets saved to the database, and what you see when the block is viewed on the front end, when you view a page. However, that screen is actually completely optional. You can skip that step. And if you do then plugin will use the markup and everything that you set up on the edit screen, and will use that as the, for the front end view.

That’s one of the ways that saves you time is you don’t actually have to create those two separate views anymore. You can just create the edit view and then the plugin will use that same view for the front end, if you want your block to look and use the same markup on the backend and the front end.

And then next is the sidebar screen and the sidebar screen works similar to the previous two screens. It lets you drag and drop HTML markup and components, but it puts all those things in the block sidebars when the block is selected in the page editor. Yeah, once the blocks selected, then whatever HTML and components you add to the sidebar appear on the block sidebar on the right hand side.

And finally there’s a style screen. And that’s just basically a CSS editor that lets you put in CSS for your block. It’s completely optional. You don’t have to put any CSS there. You can, you know, enqueue CSS like you normally would through your theme or through a plug-in or however you’re most comfortable with it, but it’s there for people who want a really easy way to include CSS for their block.

And that’s kind of the process of building the block and then you hit save. And from there, you should be able to add it to a page.

[00:22:38] Nathan Wrigley: I’m going to, to sort of run over a few of those bits and pieces. And I’m going to draw an analogy for those of you who have used a tool like Advanced Custom Fields or Metabox or something like that. The similarities here are fairly striking to me in that the attributes that the sort of fields that you might create, so for example, you would like an image when you need an image attribute, you might need like a number attribute or a true / false, like you said, and you can set all of these different things up and then you move on to the next area.

And as Vinny was just saying, this is how it’s going to look when you’re user inserts it, what is it going to look like to them as they’re actually creating the block? And then interestingly, you’ve got the front end view. That’s what it will look like once it’s complete and you’ve published it and it’s visible to the world.

And then, like you said, there’s the sidebar so that you can modify all of the settings that may be associated with that. And then obviously the style. So I think if you’ve used Advanced Custom Fields or Metabox or something like that before, you’ll be very quick to the party. You’ll learn how this works really quickly.

I have to say having had the chance to play with it a little bit today, I went through the three step… building your first block tutorial, which I found to be really straightforward. Probably took me about an hour, I would say. And I was able to follow along with the steps and I had a completely functional block, fairly straightforward example. It has an image, it has a title, some text, and then ultimately there’s a button, depending on what text you put in that button appears. It doesn’t do a lot, but it’s a really nice way to get going. So I would say that if you’re confused by any of this, go and look for the support documents that Wicked Blocker Builder guide, and you want the building your first block section.

I think you’ve done a really great job of explaining how it all works there. Well done.

[00:24:31] Vinny McKee: Thank you.

[00:24:32] Nathan Wrigley: So the backend then handles all of that. I’m just curious. Is there any situation that you can imagine where the editor view, what it is that we’re doing in the backend to actually create the block on our website, where you would like that to be radically different from the front end view. Perhaps the editor view is going to be much more basic and stripped back. And then ultimately the view that people see on the website is going to be a bit richer. I’m just trying to figure out why those two sections are separate.

[00:25:01] Vinny McKee: Yeah. So I think part of it could come down to user preference and then another part of it might just depend on block output, starting with user preference.

It’s possible that some users might just have a preference where in the editor view, maybe they want almost more of a forum based approach to inputting the data for the block. So rather than displaying a rich preview of the block, maybe they just want to way for clients to input data. But then on the front end, of course, you know, it needs to be formatted properly or the way that they want to look. And that might be one example where you would create a separate view for the front end versus the editor view. I think another example is where maybe you needed the market to be different. So for example, say you want to create a grid, a block that displays a grid of, logos for example, and you want each logo to be linkable, and this might be a contrived example because there’s probably other ways that you could do it as well. But just as an example, let’s say you wanted to create a block like that, and you could, in the end of their view, add like an image component that would allow you to select an image for the logo. And then you could add a text field that would allow you to enter the link for the logo. But you may not want to wrap the image component within a link in the editor view because you don’t want it to interfere with being able to select an image, and when you’re editing the blocks. So maybe you want to tweak the markup for the front end. So then on the front end, it would actually wrap the image within a link element, if that makes sense. So that’s another example. And especially with the free version, because there’s no conditional logic, that would be one way you could achieve altering the markup.

[00:26:40] Nathan Wrigley: Actually, the more I think about it, the more that I can imagine situations where the two might be really useful to be separated. So I’m just at the minute been looking recently at real estate agent websites, and it might be quite useful if you had a block to do with a house and you were uploading all of the bits and pieces associated with that house, particularly the images. You might want those images to display in a really full on way on the website, large colorful, and what have you, and you may just want the thumbnail on the backend so that you can see that something has been uploaded, but you don’t as the person maintaining that block, you don’t actually need to see them in all their glory. But the person coming to the website, who’s thinking about buying that house would probably wish to see them in all their glory. So yes, I’m making in roads into what you’re thinking there, I think. Is that the right idea there?

[00:27:26] Vinny McKee: Yeah, exactly. That’s a great example. And I think similar to that, something like maybe a slide show or like a hero section where maybe it displays just one image, but changes on page reload or something. So on the front end, you really only see one image, but on the back end, you need to be able to add multiple images, but you might want to way to show which images are selected. So you might display those images in the block, on the back end, but then on the front end, you would only see one image at a time. But yeah, the example that you gave to you, I think is, perfect.

[00:27:54] Nathan Wrigley: Yes. So the tool itself is a very much a drag and drop tool. You’re dragging in components that you wish your block to have, be those images, text fields, buttons, what have you. Imagine you’re building up these Lego bricks to make your block.

There must be a little bit of understanding of various bits and pieces of web technologies. For example, I would imagine you at the very basic you would need to have some understanding of HTML in order for this to work. Is there a bare minimum set of things that you need to be able to understand, to make basic use of the plugin?

[00:28:29] Vinny McKee: Yeah, like you mentioned, I think you have to have a decent understanding of how HTML works and how tags are nested, because you do create the markup yourself in this plugin, it is drag and drop, but yeah, you do have to kind of understand how markup works and then to understand some of the attributes that certain tags support in that case block attributes, but you know, HTML attributes that are added to a tag in case you need to configure those. For example, if you want to add a simple anchor link to your block, you would add an a tag, and then you might add an href attribute. But if you haven’t worked with HTML before and don’t know that’s what’s required to create a link, then yeah, you might be a little lost or that might be a little challenging.

And then too, I think, to get good results, you do have to know some CSS because just adding, you know, most blocks I would imagine that you want to have some styling. And so, you know, in theory, you could just create a block that’s unstyled that allows you to input some content. And then of course it could output it on the front end, but without any styling, you probably wouldn’t get the best results or the results you want.

So I think it does require a little bit CSS knowledge as well, although I think, you know, you can get pretty far with just very basic CSS. So there, I think it just depends on how far you want to take it.

[00:29:45] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, if you want something functional, which works, you can probably get away with minimal CSS, but if you want it to look nice, then yes, there’s going to be a little bit of a learning curve there. So I guess caveat emptor, if you are going to be looking into this plugin, there is a little bit going on.

Now, as with all tools that make something as straightforward as this does, I’m curious to know what’s going on in the background that you are relieving us the burden of. So for example, I’m adding in my attributes and that literally is a two second job. I basically click a button and add an attribute and then give it a name, an attribute name, something that I can remember and use later. And I can do that, and I could probably put five or six different attributes into my block in the space of just a couple of seconds really. Again, the same would be true with the editor view. I’m able to create all of those bits and pieces and link them up to the attributes that I made. What complexity are you stripping away? What difficult things are going on in the background? Now it may be that there’s too many to talk about, but I’m curious as to some of the challenges that you’ve stripped away.

[00:30:51] Vinny McKee: Yeah. So, I mean I think one challenge is just the whole build process that’s involved with creating blocks from scratch. So, because you’re using a plugin, it’s going to, based on how you build the block, it’s going to generate that block for you. And so you don’t have to worry about, you know, any command line stuff or knowing JavaScript or knowing React any of those things because you’re creating the block to the plugin.

So I think that’s one big thing that it addresses. Things like the attributes, it’s not hard to add attributes to a block when you’re building from scratch, other than takes a little bit of time to just to code them. But it does make it a little bit easier, I think, to be able to do it through an interface.

Something else it does as well is if you’ve created a block from scratch before, you’ve probably run into this where if your block is, let’s say you create your block and then your block is used on some pages and then say, you need to make some changes to the markup of the block. What happens is if you just make those changes to the block, you’ll actually, the next time you go to edit a page, you’ll see an invalid content warning, which is kind of scary because it looks like the block is broken and it doesn’t display correctly in the editor. And so in order to avoid that, you actually have to create a deprecated version of the block and then behind the scenes, what WordPress does, is it migrates the markup from that block that was previously added to the page, to the current blocks version or markup.

What Wicked Block Builder does is behind the scenes. Anytime you make changes to your block, it automatically creates a deprecated version of it. So that in the next time you go to edit a page that already has that block, it won’t display an error. And then there’s some other things too, like I was talking about before, how you can just create the edit view, and if you want to look the same on the front end, you don’t have to worry about that. It’ll just create the front end view based on the edit view that you created, so.

[00:32:45] Nathan Wrigley: Yes, I was quite pleased in the tutorial that you did that, just simply putting the CSS in and missing out the front-end view step altogether. Still the block looked great because, presumably it was working on what you’d put into the edit view and the CSS that was there, which was about 50 lines or something like that, made it look really nice.

Okay. So I guess the offering that things like page builders brought to the table is that it makes things much easier. Some people are critical of things like page builders. I’m sure there’s many other things that we could point the finger at, but you get the idea, because they say that the code that is output on the front end of the website might not always be the most optimal. And I guess this is one of the features that Gutenberg has, one of the poster features is that it creates lean code. I’m just asking the same question of you. The way that your building blocks, do you have anything to say about, does it create a block that is streamlined and optimally built or have you had to make concessions in order to achieve the sort of GUI aspect of it? In other words, if I knew everything there was to know about building blocks and I did the same block by hand, and then did it through your tool, would there be a noticeable difference in either of them?

[00:34:06] Vinny McKee: Yeah. So I can’t think of a notable difference offhand, other than instead of the block being pre-compiled the block is generated on the fly when it’s used in the editor. It creates a native block, and so yeah, whatever attributes you add, those are all translated to the attributes that you would code by hand. It only outputs markup that you add to the block. The only exception to that is for the components that you add. So if you add like an image component, for example. There’s a little bit of markup that it adds in the editor view to handle being able to select the image and display the image. And then of course, when it’s saved on the front end, if you don’t output or if you don’t specify specifically how you want the output to be for that front end view, then the image component will automatically generate an image tag. But yeah, for the most part, it only puts out whatever markup you define an add to your block, but yeah, as far as how the block functions and works. It’s identical to a native block. It just happens to be generated on the fly when you edit a page as opposed to something that’s compiled ahead of time.

[00:35:17] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Thank you. That’s a good answer. In terms of where this is all stored, one thing that’s coming to my mind is if I am an agency owner say, and I have a niche, let’s go for real estate, as we were talking about that a moment ago, and I’m building several websites every month. And I put a lot of work into creating a block with your tool. Is there a way that I can use these on a multitude of websites? Is there an option to export a block and then import it onto a variety of different sites? How does all that side of it work?

[00:35:51] Vinny McKee: Yeah. So that’s actually a really good question. At the moment in the plugin itself, there is no way to export and import blocks. However, those blocks are stored as a custom post type. And then the data for the block itself is saved in a post meta field and a json object. And so you can actually because it’s just another post type you can use WordPress’s default export functionality and export them that way, and then import them using the WordPress importer tool. Of course, important export is something that we have in the roadmap and something that I plan to add to the plugin. But yeah, right now it doesn’t have that functionality built in, but you can achieve it through the WordPress tools.

[00:36:31] Nathan Wrigley: That’s great. We’ll come back to the sort of roadmap, cause there’s a few items which I think are worthy of discussion and we’ll do that in a few minutes time. Staying with the actual plugin and how it works currently. I’m interested, you mentioned about things like conditional logic. I know this is getting into the territory, I think of the pro version, but nevertheless, would you just describe what that enables you to do? What kind of conditions are we able to display our blocks on?

[00:36:57] Vinny McKee: Yeah. So if you’ve ever used a form builder and wanted to, you know, only show a certain field, if another condition is true, that’s essentially what conditional logic allows you to do.

And you can apply these conditions to all sorts of things. So the way it works is when you add, for example, an HTML tag to your block, it’s actually, all of the parts of the tag are broken up. So you can add like classes in line styles, attributes to that tag. And because they’re split up that way, you can actually add conditions to each of those things.

And so what that means is say, for example, you want to add, conditionally add a class to a block, say for example, you have a block where maybe you want to give an option of you have an image on one side and then text on the other side and you want to provide the option to swap them. So by default the images on the left, text on the right, but you have an option to flip them. So that text is on the left and then the image is on the right. Yep. Let’s say you add it. You create a class that changes that layout. So what you can do is you can add that class to the block. It says image on, right, but instead of always outputting it to the block, you can add a condition that says, okay, only add this class if the option display image on right is checked.

And so, so that’s an example, and then you can also use it to conditionally output tags. So what I was talking about before, where maybe you, you don’t want to output an image wrapped in a link tag on the back end, but you do on the front end. You could add some conditional logic to the tag itself and say, okay, only I’ll put this tag, you know, if this is true, or, and then there’s also conditional logic to show or hide things based on whether or not the block is selected in the editor. So things like that.

[00:38:41] Nathan Wrigley: The brain is ticking over all the different possibilities there. That sounds really ingenious. One of the things that I always thought would be nice if I were a plugin developer, which I am not, is it would be nice to see my plugin out in the wild being used by people and the curious and interesting ways that they can implement the plugin. And I’m wondering if you have any little anecdotal tales of people who’ve used your plugin and remarkable things that they may have done with it that perhaps you didn’t anticipate.

[00:39:10] Vinny McKee: Yeah. That’s a good question. I don’t know that I have any yet, because I just released the plugin in November. And so it really, yeah, I don’t know that I’ve had anyone reach out with any particular ways that they’ve used it. I guess I’ve had maybe some questions about how to do some things that I hadn’t thought of before. And so it made me realize that, oh, okay here’s another way that people might want to approach things.

[00:39:35] Nathan Wrigley: To be fair, I didn’t realize it was as new as that. So yeah, that’s absolutely fine. Like I said, right at the top of the show, there is a different pro version. The pro version, we won’t get into the actual pricing because it may be subject to change who knows, but there are three options. You can go for single site license, a 10 site license and the unlimited site license. So three different options. Of course you can. If you’d like stay on the free wordpress dot org repository version. That’s absolutely fine.

The last little bit, just before we tie this off is the roadmap. And obviously you’ve had some feedback. You’ve just described some of the things that have come back to you from your customers. Apart from the import and export which we talked about already, what are you hoping to be adding in the near term?

[00:40:20] Vinny McKee: Yeah. So in the near term, one thing that’s been requested multiple times or quite a bit is the ability to assign an icon to the block. I’m planning to add that in as well as, there’s also been requests to add more options as far as, so blocks what’s called these support features or these support flags where you can say, okay, this block supports something like an anchor so that you can in the block sidebar, you can add like an anchor and that’s something that’s kind of WordPress adds automatically, if the block says that, okay, I support this or things like topography, you can have font size and line height support, or you can add spacing support for things like padding and margins. So just adding some more settings so that you can enable those things for your block. And then of course adding more component types. So right now there’s all the basic ones you would expect, but then adding some more, like for just more component types. So you have more options of how you build your block. And then I would also like to add an ability to save the blocks as a json. So to like a folder within your theme or wherever you decide. The blocks when you create them in the interface, they would get saved to the database like they do now, but they would also get saved to a local json file. And so that way developers could commit their blocks to version control so that they kind of have so that they can version control their blocks. And that’s kind of what I’m hoping to add in the near term.

[00:41:43] Nathan Wrigley: Just something which has occured to me just as you were saying those things, there’s an increasing commercial marketplace for blocks, not as is the case with yours, the block builder, but the blocks themselves. There might be a marketplace for relatively inexpensive blocks, which do a single thing and do it really well.

And I was wondering if there’s any possibility from your plugin to commercialize the blocks that you make? I don’t know if that’s possible, even something you’re giving any thought to, but if I spend a lot of time creating a block that’s incredibly complicated and it has some value, with your tool, would there at any point ever be options to pull that out and make it available commercially.

[00:42:27] Vinny McKee: So I think the challenge right now is it in order for it to work, you do have to have the plugin to generate the blocks. So if you create the block and then export it and import it on another site, it’s only going to work if you have the plugin installed. I do think it would be really cool is if there was a way to actually export the block code. So that you could just import the block without having to have the block builder plugin installed. But I also think that’s a fairly complicated feature to build. So probably not something that I’ll be able to add soon, but I think if that were available, then yeah, there would be a way then that you could create blocks using the tool and then publish them and be able to distribute them without having to have the plugin in order to use the block.

[00:43:13] Nathan Wrigley: Well, thank you very much for joining us today and talking about your fabulous tool, Wicked Block Builder. As I mentioned, there will be links in the show notes down below to the repository version, as well as the Wicked Block Builder website as well. But Vinny really appreciate you coming on today.

Just prior to ending, if people are curious about what you’ve talked about today and wish to reach out to you, what are some of the best ways to do that?

[00:43:40] Vinny McKee: So, you can find me on Twitter @wickedplugins, or you can also contact us through our site at wickedplugins dot com.

[00:43:48] Nathan Wrigley: Thank you very much. I appreciate you joining us today.

[00:43:50] Vinny McKee: Thanks for having me, Nathan.