Tag Archives: Block Editor

More Gutenberg madness (“This block has encountered an error and cannot be previewed”)

The WordPress Gutenberg project (a.k.a. the Block Editor) is supposed to make building WordPress sites faster and… well… once you get the hang of it, that often is the case. Recently I’ve actually marveled at how quickly it has allowed me to build out a site, now that my base theme is getting a bit more polished. And creating block patterns in WordPress 6 is super slick, after you learn a few of its quirks.

But then, the Block Editor will throw me a curveball that can derail things for days. For instance, there’s this:

I have a site using my custom theme that all of a sudden started throwing out this message after a recent update. It’s on the Separator block (a.k.a. a glorified <hr> tag). I took a look at the code, and there’s nothing overly complicated going on. The best clue I had to the problem was that it may have something to do with the .has-alpha-channel-opacity CSS class getting applied to the tag.

Then I noticed that in a child theme I’m building for another site, the error didn’t occur. I tried switching between the child theme and parent theme, and sure enough — with the parent theme, I get the error; with the child theme, I don’t. So… what is it?

Well… with almost any type of problem solving, it’s about trial and error, finding differences, ruling things out, and narrowing your search. But it was really hard to find anything between the parent theme and child theme that might cause this. Certainly there were no differences in how they treat Separator blocks.

I came back to that CSS class. Why is that there? Where Gutenberg is concerned, when in doubt, it’s always a good idea to have a look at the theme.json file. And, sure enough, that’s where the difference was. In my parent theme, I had this (note line 13):


But in the child theme, I had this:


Yes, for some reason, an empty array for the color.gradients setting allows the Block Editor to properly parse the Separator block, but a null value causes the error.

WHY???

I don’t know. I don’t really care. At least I was able to fix it. But this again makes me question the wisdom of the entire Gutenberg enterprise. I still don’t really buy the rationale that this JSON file is the way to go, although I am at least starting to understand why it was chosen. However I think this example illustrates some of the negatives of the approach.

Quick CSS fix for WordPress Block Editor (Gutenberg) link hover color issue

The WordPress Block Editor (a.k.a. Gutenberg) makes it easy to set the text, background, and link colors on any block. But links can and often do have more than one color. And there’s no option here for setting the hover color. So what do you do in what, I think, may be a common situation, where you’re setting a background color on a block and making the link text white, but your theme’s link hover color is either the background color you’re switching to, or something way too close to it?

I’ve come up with a very tidy bit of CSS code that will make your link hover state match the custom link color — granted, you lose the UX of a unique color on hover state, but you gain necessary legibility and accessibility, which I guarantee is more important.

This may not work in every situation, but it’s so simple that it’s worth investigating as an option. With this code, any time you have a block that sets both a custom background color and a custom link color, it will ensure that the hover/focus state matches the custom link color:

main .has-background-color.has-link-color a:focus,
main .has-background-color.has-link-color a:hover
{ color: inherit; }

Update (April 4, 2023): Yeah, don’t do this. You can specify these colors in theme.json. I’m not sure if this is a recent addition, the documentation was previously lacking, or I just didn’t find it, but anyway… do this instead.

This is the kind of thing that I find maddening about Gutenberg

First off, if you are the regular reader of this blog, you are painfully aware of how much I am waffling on rejecting or embracing Gutenberg (a.k.a. the WordPress Block Editor). There are things I genuinely do like about it, but I also have some fundamental disagreements with its approach (like the facts that it writes inline CSS directly into post content, or that its templates don’t support PHP code).

And then there are the weird little quirks that just make using it much more difficult than it needs to be. In general I have learned that this comes down to the incredible finickiness of JSON. Fine. But the fact that one character out of place in the theme.json file can break everything seems a bit ridiculous… or at least, a big step backwards for usability.

Fix your syntax. Sure. I wish JSON allowed trailing commas the way PHP — and even JavaScript! — does, but I can grok the fact that it doesn’t and learn to adapt. What I have a bit more trouble with is the problem that struck yesterday, only because it was so hard to pin down.

I’m working on a new, small block theme as a one-off for a unique project — a website that will feed menu board monitors in a pizza place. Seems like a perfect opportunity to practice and experiment a bit with what Gutenberg can do. (And, after over a decade of trying to find the “right” way to give restaurant staff a reliable but still easy-to-manage web interface for updating menu information, I actually think Gutenberg’s Block Patterns might be the optimal solution.)

So here’s the maddening thing. I was setting up my theme.json file like a good Block Theme developer, defining all of my colors, typography, etc. And then I started loading in some test content. All looked fine on the back end, in the Block Editor itself. But none of the styles were getting applied on the front end!

I googled the problem, of course, and found a WordPress forum thread about this very issue.

Huh. Sure enough, what’s described in the thread was exactly what was happening in my case. I had this line in my code (font names changed to protect the innocent):

"fontFamily": "'Helvetica Neue', 'Comic Sans', 'sans-serif",

Do you see the problem there? (No, it’s not the trailing comma… that actually belongs, in context.) It’s the stray apostrophe before sans-serif. Removing that fixed the problem.

Now, if this were just in straight CSS, I would have seen the problem immediately, because the syntax highlighting in BBEdit would’ve gone all wonky. But since this was inside a text string in JSON, it looked just fine, and I didn’t notice the apostrophe was there.

I get that the parser that converts the contents of theme.json into CSS would get thrown off by this. Honestly, I’m surprised it didn’t cause the whole page to bork with a PHP fatal error… I’m pretty sure earlier versions did throw a fatal error if there was any problem parsing the theme.json file. So this is… an improvement?

I also get that the generated CSS output would not work properly. What I don’t get is that it all looked correct in the Block Editor. Why was the Block Editor on the admin side able to “fix” this issue, but on the front end it didn’t? It doesn’t make sense!

Anyway, trying to unravel that mystery wasted about an hour late yesterday afternoon, when I was finally starting to get productive after having a near existential crisis over Gutenberg for most of the week.

These are hard times to be a WordPress developer. No, strike that. These are hard times to be a generalist web developer who happened to make the fateful decision 8 years ago to go all-in on WordPress.

Musings on my future with WordPress

Regular readers of this blog, if such exist, may have noticed that one of the three (!) posts I published yesterday has gone missing. I unpublished it this morning, as I further contemplate the future of WordPress, and whether or not I want to be a part of it.

First off, I need to make it clear that I will be a part of it, because ICS Calendar Pro has become a substantial part of my business, and I only see that growing. The question for me, however, is whether or not the rest of my business will continue to revolve around WordPress the way it has since 2014.

I’ve been building websites for much longer than that. By 2014 I had already been writing HTML for 20 years, and building websites professionally for 18. My decision to go all-in on WordPress in 2014, and abandon the CakePHP-based custom CMS I had been painstakingly crafting for the previous 6 years, hinged on my realization that WordPress was evolving quickly into a powerful, general-purpose CMS.

But therein lies the problem. I am part of a very large community of serious, professional web developers who embraced WordPress (the open source project) as a general-purpose, if decidedly idiosyncratic, Content Management System (CMS). And we’re the ones who collectively turned it into the dominant platform that it is today. But I don’t think Automattic, or much of the WordPress core team, sees it that way. They’ve never lost the original vision of it as a simple blogging platform, even though the web world has largely moved beyond blogging (at least the open source, self-hosted kind).

Automattic (the company owned by WordPress creator Matt Mullenweg) isn’t competing with Drupal or Joomla. They’re competing with Squarespace, Wix and Medium. And as such, their focus is on how to make WordPress.com (their commercial, hosted version of WordPress) into a stronger challenger to those platforms. The open source WordPress project that I and my fellow developers have grown to love is just an afterthought to that mission. Or at least, so it seems, with the aggressive pushing of Gutenberg (a.k.a. the Block Editor) since 2018, and even more alarmingly, full-site editing (a.k.a. Site Editor) this year.

Gutenberg is one thing. I started off hating it, not because it was a bad idea, but because it was a poorly executed one — or more specifically, that it was forced on the WordPress community before it was mature enough to replace the classic editor. But I absolutely believed in the idea of block editing in general. I had already been working extensively on my own custom theme that was built around ACF Flexible Content. Many others turned to “page builder” plugins/themes like Divi, Beaver Builder, WP Bakery, or Elementor.

I despise those page builders because they introduced their own, often convoluted interfaces that look and feel nothing like WordPress, and most frustratingly, are not easier for end users. The only people they’re easier for are “no code” website builders, and maybe I’m an old man yelling at clouds, but I feel like you shouldn’t be charging people money to build websites for them if you don’t know how to write code. Less curmudgeonly: These page builders require just as much work to learn as writing code does, but if you learn to code, you walk away with a much more valuable skill.

But I digress. For the sake of adding block editing flexibility to the content management aspects of using WordPress, I have no problem with Gutenberg as it stands in 2022. In fact, I’m using it to write these words. It is much nicer than the old classic editor — at least, now it is; not so much when it debuted in 2018 — and more importantly, it’s the WordPress way as opposed to page builders. Even if it’s only “the WordPress way” because WordPress has changed to be like it, rather than it fitting what WordPress was before.

I still have a major problem, in principle, with the entire concept of the Site Editor though. And the blog post I cited earlier this year feels more relevant to me than ever. I still don’t think it’s really for anybody. Except Automattic.

It’s not that the Site Editor is going to put people like me out of work. It’s that, if this is the direction things are going, it makes absolutely no sense for people like us to continue to use WordPress as our platform of choice.

Taking this thought a step further (and following the links), we get to the heart of the matter for me, which is perfectly summed up in a post called The Complicated Futility of WordPress. Specifically (emphasis mine):

The thought of client side marketing interns ‘play(ing) around with site-wide designs’ should make the blood of any professional run cold. Sites that have been painstakingly, designed and built, reviewed and refined to the last detail every step of the way with stakeholders on the client side, optimising UX, legibility, performance and upholding the client’s brand can now be squelched in an instant by someone 3 months into their job who prefers yellow.

No doubt we could work up a system to prevent this, we can restrict access and force use of the classic editor etc, but that’s where the ‘complicated futility’ comes in. It’s one thing to find a way to cherry pick aspects of the software to serve your purpose, it’s another thing entirely to try to build in complete opposition to it.

—coderjerk

For me, it’s been a difficult year of loss, with the death of my mother in September (and several months of decline preceding that), and some distance from my work. It’s also been a year when I have struggled constantly, through my efforts at building a new Block Editor-friendly theme to replace my trusty old ACF-based one, to find some sense in a lot of the decisions that have been made about how Gutenberg works and the direction WordPress is going. My low motivation, easy distraction, and generally slow progress on the theme, I am just now realizing, has been due to the amount of cognitive dissonance I was feeling, as I realized that everything about my approach to building websites as a professional developer, everything I am looking for in the tools I use to do my job, seems, as coderjerk put it, to be in complete opposition to what WordPress is becoming.

As a freelancer, I keep fairly diligent records of my time spent working on client projects. I have to. It’s how I make money. But I am not as rigorous in tracking how I use my personal time. I wish I had logged the time I’ve spent over the course of 2022 experimenting with, and then abandoning, various potential WordPress replacements. It usually only takes me an hour or two to realize that, as much as I am resisting learning the seemingly nonsensical framework (if you can call it that) for building custom blocks, block patterns, block themes, and everything else in the “new way” of WordPress, it is still probably superior to whatever platform I’m testing out that day. So I’ve dismissed ClassicPress as a backwards-looking dead-end. I’ve tried and cast aside more random niche CMSes than I can recall. (But, to prove this isn’t just empty talk, a few of them are e107, Craft, and Concrete, and I’ve even contemplated Drupal, of all things, as well as resurrecting my old CakePHP-based system.)

None of that has gone anywhere, because it was immediately apparent to me that none of them felt right. Not built on the right foundation, not polished enough, not enough momentum behind them. Well, nothing has as much momentum as WordPress. But now I’ve begun to wonder, is it momentum… or inertia?

Today’s discovery feels different. Since I agreed with so much of coderjerk’s post, I took the final suggestion of Twill to heart. I don’t have experience with Laravel, but I know that back when I was in CakePHP world, it was a big competitor. An employee of mine — in the short sliver of time when I had employees — built a custom site for a client using Laravel and he loved it. Twill is built on Laravel, so it seems fitting for me that the next chapter of my career might revolve around a return to MVC frameworks, in their much more modern, mature form. And while this gives me a lot of new stuff to learn — I’ve avoided doing much with systems that rely on Composer and managing dependencies — it all feels like the right stuff to have to learn in 2022, vs. what I’d have to learn to be a Gutenberg ace.

I’ve spent a few hours this afternoon getting the lay of the land with Twill. And while it has thrown me a few surprising challenges even in the basic setup, it’s also giving me a giddy feeling of just having fun geeking out on learning new systems… those moments of delight when I finally get how something works and I see the genius behind it. I’ve spent a lot of time trying to understand the structures underlying Gutenberg, and the only feeling that ever gives me is… “What… why???”

I plan to spend most of tomorrow continuing to tinker with my little Twill test setup. I may still end up scrapping it, and I know I will probably never completely leave the immense gravitational pull of WordPress. But I’m feeling more excited about web technology than I have in years, and more optimistic about my future in this business.

The more I use Gutenberg (the WordPress Block Editor), the more I simultaneously like and dislike it

Where do even I begin with Gutenberg, a.k.a. the Block Editor? Well, I don’t really need to “begin” with it, because I’ve been posting about my various frustrations with it for over 5 years now. (This isn’t even the first Gutenberg-related post I’ve started with “Where do I begin…”)

It took me a long time, but I did finally embrace it. Sort of. I’ve suspended new development on my own pre-Gutenberg block-style theme, 34 Blocks, built around ACF Flexible Content, and for most of the year I’ve been working on its replacement, a Gutenberg-centered theme that I regrettably (for the difficulty of typing it) have named 34 Blocks².

It’s better than bad, it’s good

I will say it, without reservation: Gutenberg, which I will respectfully refer to henceforth as the Block Editor, has gotten a lot better. Taken on its own as a piece of software, I might even, now, describe it as… “good.”

But.

There are so, so many things I would have done differently if I were building it myself. Sure, I take a more “opinionated” (as they say) approach to coding and web design, but that opinion is informed not only by a quarter century of professional experience, but by constantly building to suit specific client needs. Before I started using WordPress full-time in 2014, I had been building my own custom CMSes from scratch, going back to late 2000, when I was using… ugh… ASP and Microsoft SQL Server 7. On Windows NT 4. (I get a sinking feeling in my stomach just remembering those technologies once existed.)

So, a) get off my lawn, and b) WordPress has always done things the wrong way, so why change that now? Like PHP itself, WordPress has long been a marvel of being a tool that just about anybody (relatively speaking) could use to “just get stuff done,” without a soul-crushing learning curve. But its architecture borders on madness. It should’ve used an MVC framework 15 years ago, just like it should be using something like Bootstrap now.

Jane, stop this crazy thing!

I’m really concerned about extending the Block Editor content model to full-site editing, and the Site Editor as it currently stands is (in my estimation) a disaster in every conceivable way. But I don’t want to dwell on that too much at the moment. (Mainly, much like Donald Trump, Elon Musk, or cryptocurrency, I want to pretend it doesn’t exist.)

So far I haven’t had much good to say, but believe it or not, I actually like using the Block Editor. When I play by its rules. If you use it to design your pages, great. It gives you way more flexibility than the old “classic” editor.

But you know who doesn’t use it to design pages? Designers. If, like me, you work with designers who deliver you Adobe Illustrator files, and your job is to turn those designs into actual functioning web pages, Good luck shoehorning their designs into the Block Editor. Sure, you can create custom blocks (if you bother to learn React, which, yuck), or you might be able to create a Block Pattern that does the job. But just about any way you go about it, it’s more work than before.

Which brings me to the starkest realization I’ve had about all of this. It happened about a month ago, when I had a rush project. I needed to put together a small site, just a couple of pages, but it needed to be a very precise design, with a lot of polish, and I needed to turn it around in a week. The client didn’t really need the ability to edit content — if they have changes, they’ll come to me anyway.

So I built it by hand.

Oh, I didn’t write every line of code by hand. I used Bootstrap to get my structure started, and I also relied extensively on AOS for some slick animations. I built myself a super-rudimentary PHP framework that is kind of an MVC-lite. (There’s no database, but I did put some content into PHP arrays to allow for loops instead of repeating a ton of identical HTML code.)

The end result looks as close as possible to the designer’s Illustrator file (with my additional adaptations to make the site fluid and responsive), it’s super slick, and the client loved it. And it would have taken me at least 3-4 times as long to do with WordPress and the Block Editor, with inferior results.

I’m aware of the irony… so don’t bother pointing that out

This all brings me back to a question I frequently, and increasingly, ask myself: Who is WordPress for? The core team clearly still thinks it’s for bloggers. Do they still exist? For the past decade, I’ve thought of it as an extremely versatile, open-ended CMS (or CMS-ish at least), suitable for building just about any kind of website and giving my clients easy access to edit their content without messing up the layout.

But I’ve also come to realize over the years that a lot of my clients either a) don’t need or b) don’t want to edit their own content. Or even if they think they do, in practice they edit things so rarely that they need my help to remind them how things work whenever they do actually make a change.

That’s not always the case; I have some very engaged clients who are using their sites constantly, and for them, WordPress has been the perfect tool. Very few of them, yet, are using the Block Editor though, so we’ll see if that remains true.

My business is still very much dependent upon WordPress. Not only do I use it to create most of my clients’ sites, but I have a growing side business building and maintaining multiple WordPress plugins. I want WordPress to be great, and I want it to continue to grow. I want to continue recommending it for my clients.

But I am also realizing more and more that there are definitely some clients for whom WordPress isn’t the best choice. I no longer see it as “suitable for building just about any kind of website.” In cases where either the client doesn’t want/need editing capabilities, or where the designer delivers a highly unique design that isn’t well-suited to the Block Editor, it’s time to consider alternatives. For me, that probably means, ironically, going back to custom-built CMSes, or at least custom-built templates without a CMS. For some clients, that might mean Squarespace or Shopify, even if that then means I’m not the right developer for them.

Update, in the cold light of the following morning: After writing this, I went back and skimmed through some of my previous posts, then read a few other people’s posts I had linked to but had not given a close read initially. That’s when I came across coderjerk’s The Complicated Futility of WordPress (again), and it spoke to me like nothing I have read in ages. Yes! This is me! Yes, I am not alone! Even as I have spent most of my work time this year wrapping my brain around the Block Editor and trying to create my own Block Theme, I’ve also been harboring secret thoughts that maybe this is the end of the WordPress road for me, and have been looking for alternatives. I never get very far though before I abandon the idea of learning a new toolset and retreat back to WordPress. But WordPress is making me learn a new toolset anyway, and it’s one that, deep down, I know doesn’t make a lot of sense. Coderjerk concludes the post with a note about Laravel-based Twill, and I am genuinely intrigued. It looks like it may be “The One.” But I’ve thought that before. Still, I intend to give it some serious consideration.