A few aimless thoughts

[DoncoMarketing]

1. It would be awesome to have a global light/dark mode preset in the builder along with a global workspace controls preset. I know you can currently set this preference by user but when I turn my site over to the client and record a walkthrough-video on how to do a few things, my workspace always looks different from theirs.
   
   
2. I know that you can see page-level meta fields in the page settings popup. Would be amazing if you could change the Featured Image here. Always weird sending clients to the WP Page for that one item.
   
   
3. Noticed in the latest WP update that all of the builder data shows on the WP Edit Page screen and you have to scroll quite a bit to get to the “edit in pro” button.
   
   
4. I’ve mentioned this before but it would be cool having some sort of easily accessible basic logic for headers like “logged in” vs “logged out” and/or also being able to assign headers based on parent page.
   
   
5. Native gradient overlays in the Advanced Background layers would be pretty darn cool albeit a bit complicated to implement I’m sure.
   
   
6. It would be great if there was some clean way to visually organize Global Blocks. Many times I’ll have global blocks for team member profiles as well as some miscellaneous ones. It would be great for clients to be able to easily go into the Team Member “folder” and find all Team Member Global Blocks housed in there.
   
   
7. While we’re talking about Global Blocks, I’ve mentioned this before and I think it is still super relevant, It would be great if the dynamic data could access global blocks. Would make it easier than popping in the shortcode.
   
   

Welp. That’s that. Hopefully no offense taken by these brain fart ideas. Just needed to get them out of my head and into the interwebs.

Thanks for all you do. Hope you’re all staying safe.

[alexander]

Thanks Josh! Great stuff here as always.

1. I don’t think we want to add yet another layer of managing things. It might be better if you just log into their account once and set anything to be the same if needed. Alternatively, if you have a child theme you can tap into the cs_app_preference_defaults filter to override the default preferences.

2. Good point. We can look into adding this. It’s likely that in the Layout Builder update we will be giving a refresh to everything in that settings modal. We’re probably going to switch to a design that doesn’t cover the whole screen so you can see colors, fonts, etc. changing live in whatever you’re building.

3. Gotcha - we’d definitely consider that a bug. Probably a few things to reconcile after WP made changes. We’ll look into working that out for the next update.

4. Still in our feature backlog, but regretfully not one we’ve been able to prioritize yet.

5. Would be really awesome. It’s another one we’ve not been able to prioritize yet and it has some unique considerations because gradients would need something to manage the different stops. We’d basically need to design and build a UI for managing gradients. I think it would be a great option for anywhere you find a background color. Perhaps a more advanced color picker would appear and allow gradient creation. The Layout Builder cycle has some improvements planned that are a bug step in the right direction for improving how styles are managed. For example, we’re looking to support multiple Box Shadows in a list in addition to a single shadow. Once we get some of those mechanics in we’ll be better positioned to explore things like gradients.

6. I don’t think we’ll add something like this, so your best bet would be to define a strict naming convention to help keep things discoverable alphabetically or with search.

7. Honestly, that shortcode was meant only as a stopgap to help piping blocks into places outside of the builder. We want to be careful to not lean heavily into Global Blocks because they introduce performance concerns on the site. For example, if you create 10 Global Blocks each for a specific team member, then you add all 10 of those blocks inside of another page, you’re effectively forcing WordPress to do the work of loading 11 pages. From a performance standpoint you want to use Global Blocks sparingly

On that note, a better alternative would be solutions that will soon be available in the Layout Builder. You could create a Layout that queries a custom post type of team members and outputs them all together for example. You could also use a new Post element to grab one team member and output it individually somewhere.

Keep an eye out for a post early next week about what we’re working on at the moment in terms of the Layout Builder cycle. Now that the new Themeco site is online we’re back in the product development flow again!

[strobley]

Hi @alexander

Thanks for explaining the considerable performance considerations when using Global Blocks, I was not aware.

What is the status of WordPress/WooCommerce native Blocks in the upcoming Layout Builder release?

This has be discussed many times over the past 12month+ in multiple previous betas given its the direction WordPress for all content components. It also plays nice with plugins like ACF, not being able to use WordPress/WooCommerce native Blocks as an Element inside X/Pro limitation that would be great to see finally dealt with.

Would WordPress/WooCommerce native Blocks with AFC and dynamic content have the same performance limitation as Global Blocks?

EDIT: By plays nice with plugins like ACF, I mean ACF, Toolset, and the like create dynamic Wordpress Blocks. Though often discussed, I do not believe it is possible to use any of these Blocks as Elements in the X/Pro builders?.. or can we?

[michaelbourne]

For #4: https://michaelbourne.ca/assign-pro-header-search-results-page/

[DoncoMarketing]

You sir, are awesome. Care to pluginize this sucker?

Still would be nice to have a basic native logic menu.

[RubberDuckers]

@alexander - on the note about Global Blocks causing potential performance issues; if the GB is within a modal, does this get loaded on page load or when the user clicks the modal button?

Thanks in advance!

[alexander]

Hey everyone, hope you’re all doing well!

@strobley RE: WooCommerce, we’ve made some new WooCommerce specific elements that will help you create single product and product listing pages in the layout builder. Looking forward to getting your feedback on all of that. Still not plans at the moment to make Gutenburg blocks accessible in our builders. Anytime you add more WordPress queries, you’re incurring a performance hit.

@DoncoMarketing We have this fancy new assignment control coming with this update:

@michaelbourne , any changes made with those filters will still apply until a header is given rules in the new system.

@RubberDuckers, if you’re just doing one Global Block in a modal here or there I wouldn’t worry about it. It gets worse if you add a bunch of them, but caching will help. The performance cost comes with the page load since all that markup and styling needs to be prepared in advance before they open the modal.

PS: Just following up on some older threads as we get closer to the next beta. We’re about to start testing it all internally. Keep an eye out a bit later in the month.