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A minimal, fast development environment for WordPress Gutenberg blocks

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Guty Blocks 2

This is designed to be a minimal, fast build environment for making WordPress Gutenberg blocks. Our priorities are to:

  1. Reduce time to development by making block generation and enqueuing fast
  2. Have a build that requires minimal enqueuing and minimal file size

To Use

  1. Clone into plugins folder of your WordPress instance
  2. Activate Guty blocks 2 in your WordPress admin
  3. In the terminal, go to the plugin folder guty-blocks-2
  4. Run npm install

npm run build will run the webpack build once.

npm run watch will run the webpack watcher and build when files are changed.

To generate a block

  1. In the terminal, go to the plugin folder guty-blocks-2
  2. Run node generate
  3. After you follow the prompts your block source files will be in assets/src/{block name}
  4. Make sure you either run npm run build or npm run watch
  5. Enjoy your block!

Deleting a block

You will need to delete the block folder and remove the import statements from index.js (and index.view.js if it included a view script).

Production build

Running npm run build:prod will build files as usual but will include js minification. A todo item for me is to include CSS minification as well.

Setup details

  • Instead of creating a php enqueuing function for each individual block, we import individual blocks into one index.js file and one style.css file.

  • Anything inside of a *.editor.css file is inlined in the block using webpack style-loader. It is never built into the dist folder, and it will not be seen on the front end view of the page. Anything in *.view.css files will be included in the single css file. This still results in the intended effect of editor styles overwriting view styles, and view styles being in both the editor and the view of the page.

  • React and ReactDOM are treated as external dependencies, meaning that they can be referenced in webpack builds, but are not actually included in the index.js build. This is so we don't duplicate React when we run the blocks. As a result file sizes for these built blocks are much smaller.

Block with view script

Sometimes there is a need to run a script on the viewing of a page. The build block with view script sets up a {blockname}.view.js file that will only be run on the front end of the site. Note that this only provides a place to run scripts that will run in the view, and the actual searching of the dom and attaching functionality is completely written by you.

Updates

July 11, 2019

  • Fixed lodash dependency issue
  • Added npm run build:prod to allow for js minification if desired

April 1, 2019

  • Removed some erroneous lines in index.js and index.view.js that were causing build errors

March 10, 2019

  • Include RichText
  • Include support for align
  • Don't include default styles ins css and don't include css className in edit or view
  • Updated readme regarding view blocks
  • Adding generate-template-files (? not sure why it wasn't installing before?)

Thanks

Thanks to Robert a.k.a codeBelt for creating generate-template-files which was a great way to set up block template generation!

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