New Toolkit Simplifies the Process of Creating Gutenberg Blocks

Ahmad Awais, who created the Gutenberg Boilerplate last year, has released a Guten Block Toolkit. The toolkit substantially simplifies the creation of Gutenberg Blocks by providing no configuration, one dependency, and no lock-in.

Awais created the toolkit after receiving feedback that configuring things like Webpack, React, ES 6/7/8/Next, ESLint, Babel and keeping up with their development was too difficult.

"Developers told me that they built Gutenberg blocks with ES5 because the amount of time required to configure, set up, and learn tools like Babel, Webpack, ESLint, Prettier, etc. wasn’t worth it," Awais said.

"So, yes! I went ahead and built a solution — a zero-config-js #0CJS WordPress developers’ toolkit called create-guten-block!"

Creating blocks using the toolkit is a three-step process.

Developers begin by installing Node version 8 or higher on a local server. The next step is to run the create-guten-block command and provide a name for the plugin that will be created. This command also creates the folder structure necessary to maintain the project. The last step is to run the NPM start command which runs the plugin in development mode.

Once these steps are completed, the WordPress plugin will be compatible with Gutenberg and have React.js, ES 6/7/8/Next, and Babel, which also has ESLint configurations for code editors to detect and use automatically.

The Guten Block Toolkit comes with the following:

React, JSX, and ES6 syntax support.

Webpack dev/production build process behind the scene.

Language extras beyond ES6 like the object spread operator.

Auto-prefixed CSS, so you don’t need -webkit or other prefixes.

A build script to bundle JS, CSS, and images for production with source-maps.

Hassle-free updates for the above tools with a single dependency cgb-scripts.

The project has received positive feedback, including from members of Gutenberg's development team.

Mad props to @MrAhmadAwais for making a super useful Gutenberg tool that I've been really looking forward to! 🎉

I'm excited about the possibilities for this, and I love how it's embraced WordPress' "decisions, not options" philosophy, doing all of the hard work for you. 💪💯 https://t.co/hUAQVDL7S1
— Gary (@GaryPendergast) January 20, 2018

Tried the https://t.co/WkvhwSVBh6 from @MrAhmadAwais, had a block within a minute. Now it's time to finish the #Gutenberg course from @zgordon to actually build something useful :D
— Igor Benić (@igorbenic) January 22, 2018

With a stable release now available to the public, Awais is working on 2.0.0. "The next step is to get this toolkit tested and mature the entire app to release version 2.0.0 for that not only do I need your support, I ask that you hop on board and contribute — that’s the only way forward," he said.

Create Guten Block Toolkit is MIT licensed and available for free on GitHub. Contributions are welcomed!