Tag Archives: Gutenberg

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; }

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.

Making Bootstrap work with the WordPress Block Editor

tl;dr: You need to load Bootstrap’s CSS in the 'wp_enqueue_scripts' hook with a priority lower than 10.

Where do I begin with this one? First, some foundational details: I’m old school. I’ve been a professional web developer/designer since 1996. I’ve embraced new technologies as they come along, but I tend to bristle at things that are either a) not an open standard or b) need to be compiled.

I refused to use Flash. In the end I was proved right, as open web technologies supplanted it. Flash is dead, and the open web is not. I still refuse to use CSS preprocessors for a similar reason. They’re a non-standard workaround to limitations in the current standard. They fragment the landscape instead of pushing the standard forward. And as CSS variables have gained wide browser support, preprocessors are beginning to look as pointless as Flash.

Now the thing I hate is npm — or any similar tech that requires me to run shell scripts and compile anything. I’ve long since embraced server-side scripting, using open source libraries like jQuery, and even using a pre-built CMS (or CMS-ish system) like WordPress. (Yes, for many years I rolled my own CMSes.) The bottom line for me is, if it’s code I can download simply and treat as a “black box,” fine. But if it’s something I need to get my hands dirty in, I shouldn’t need anything to work with it but a text editor.

All of that to say, I am having a bit of a time with where things are going these days with Gutenberg, a.k.a. the WordPress Block Editor. And I haven’t exactly been quiet about it here.

This week I needed to extend the Block Editor by creating a carousel/slideshow block. Yep, I’ve rolled my own with these for many years as well, but this time around I decided I wanted to work with something pre-built, so I settled on the one in Bootstrap. I don’t really need all of Bootstrap (although I suspect over time I will need more of it), but customizing it requires using npm, so I decided to go ahead and include the entire pre-compiled package in my theme.

That’s when the problems began.

Oh, the carousel works great! But I spent a bunch of time yesterday trying to figure out why the custom background color and fonts defined in my theme.json file were being ignored… especially since they’re right there in the inline CSS inside the <head> of every page.

Don’t even get me started on inline CSS, or the way so many people in the industry seem to worship PageSpeed Insights. Once again we’re skating to where the puck is, instead of where it’s going, and to stretch the analogy to the limit, we’re melting all of the ice in front of it too. This is not the way to move web development forward intelligently.

Ah-hem.

Eventually I worked out what’s happening. WordPress, historically, was designed to allow you to define dependencies, so you could load CSS and JavaScript in a logical manner. Gutenberg/Block Editor throws all of this out the window with this inline CSS. Certain “critical” inline CSS for the Block Editor gets loaded immediately regardless of the dependencies you put into wp_enqueue_style(). The result being, styles defined (indirectly, in a way more convoluted way than vanilla CSS) in my theme.json file were appearing before the Bootstrap CSS file was loaded. And since I’m using the compiled Bootstrap instead of a custom npm build, there’s a bunch of “general” CSS it’s throwing in, including color and font definitions on the <body> tag that override Gutenberg’s earlier inline CSS.

Fortunately, someone else had the same problem and figured out a solution. But since, in 2022, spammers overrun any forum thread that’s left open too long, the thread was already locked and I couldn’t express my appreciation to the poster who shared it. So I’m writing this blog post instead.

The trick is to load any third-party CSS that you might need to override using a separate function called on the 'wp_enqueue_scripts' hook, with a low priority number (less than 10, since that’s the magic default).

Here’s a generalized version of the code I’m using:

function my_enqueue_scripts_early() {

    $ver = '1.0.0'; // Your theme version; could also be a class property, constant, global variable, etc.

    wp_enqueue_style('bootstrap-style', get_theme_file_uri('vendors/bootstrap/bootstrap.min.css'), array(), $ver);
    wp_enqueue_script('bootstrap', get_theme_file_uri('vendors/bootstrap/bootstrap.bundle.min.js'), array('jquery'), $ver);

}
add_action('wp_enqueue_scripts', 'my_enqueue_scripts_early', 8);

WordPress development in the Gutenberg era: Threading the needle of Block Theme development

As described in several of my recent posts here, I have been working for the past month or so on building my first “all-in” Block Theme for WordPress.

After nearly 4 years of adamantly resisting “Gutenberg” and the new Block Editor revolution — not because I disliked the block concept, but because I disagreed philosophically with the core team’s approach (to what constitutes a block, which types of blocks are important, and which technologies are used to manage the UI of the editing screen) — I am finally accepting that if I am to continue making a living primarily as a WordPress developer, I need to give up on my Classic Editor, Advanced Custom Fields “Flexible Content” approach, and embrace that the Block Editor is now The Way.

One of numerous challenges I’ve faced in this process (on top of the learning curve of a completely unfamiliar method of constructing themes, the dearth of adequate and up-to-date documentation, and the core team’s willingness to allow very unfinished versions of functionality to roll out in public WordPress releases) is figuring out the best way to approach some of the more complex design structures I am used to dealing with via ACF’s Flexible Content fields.

My biggest hurdle is recognizing that what I think of as a “block” is not what the WordPress core team thinks of as a “block”

Here I will admit this is a shortcoming of my own approach. I have been “opinionated” in my development approach (well, about everything, really), and created large-scale and complex “blocks” that, in Gutenberg/Block Editor terms, would really be “groups” or “block patterns,” not blocks. Gutenberg blocks are more granular.

Gutenberg blocks are also static, in that they generally do not interact with database content, or if they do, it is in very limited “bloggy” ways that don’t align with my use of WordPress as a general-purpose CMS.

So I’ve found myself falling back on ACF. I like its server-side approach. I’m more accustomed to dealing with PHP and MySQL. I use JavaScript (mainly jQuery) a fair bit for front-end interactive elements, but I don’t build complex functionality in JavaScript and I avoid AJAX if I can help it.

You can see I’m destined for a strained relationship with the Block Editor.

A concrete example: “Tiles”

One of the most idiosyncratic elements of my old ACF approach is the block I call “Tiles.” It’s a way of creating a set of small blurbs to link to other pages/posts. There are numerous options for appearance: number of tiles per row, relationship between the image and text in a tile, etc. And there are also numerous options for the content source: a specific page or post (with the title, featured image and excerpt automatically pulled in), a dynamic feed from the blog or a specific category (likewise with the info pulled in automatically, except this one auto-updates when there’s a new post), or a completely custom-built tile, where you manually select the image and enter the text and link.

Here are screenshots of the ACF-based editing tools for my Tiles block.

I tried recreating this entire setup as a new ACF-based Block field group. It worked, to be sure, but the complex ACF editing layout really did not feel right in the new Block Editor interface, either in the sidebar (eek) or in the main content area. It felt like a cop-out.

Then I considered creating a block pattern. I knew this would lack some of the benefits of my ACF-based Tiles block, but one in particular: the option to dynamically pull in the details of another page/post, rather than manually entering the text. But as a starting point, I decided to recreate the “custom” tile type.

That, also, worked. But it was finicky and didn’t apply well in a lot of different places. So I realized that instead of creating a Tiles block pattern, I needed to create a Tile block pattern. Just one tile. Instead of a monolithic block that was really a group, users would insert each individual tile into whatever larger structure they want (e.g. columns).

The end result was a block pattern that looked like this (screenshot instead of live code because, well, you really don’t want to use this):

I was really proud of myself for using the new “lock” feature to force the elements to stay in a particular order, but to allow the user to remove elements they don’t need, such as the image, lead-in text, or CTA button.

Still… I didn’t like it. And it didn’t allow for dynamic sources.

Along the way I also finally came to grasp another fundamental limitation of the Block Editor and Block Patterns. Since all of the parameters of the blocks are stored as HTML comments right in the post content, you (the theme developer) can’t update the design of a block pattern once it’s inserted into a page/post. The Block Editor isn’t dynamically inserting content into a template when the page is rendered. It’s making a one-off copy of the template and storing it right along with the content at the point when the content is inserted into the page/post.

This seems, to me, to be a fundamental flaw in the entire Gutenberg/Block Editor approach. It’s bad enough that if I were building it myself, I’d have stopped right there and taken a completely different direction. Maybe there’s a long-term plan to address this limitation, but for now it appears to be here to stay. Which led me back to ACF.

Threading the needle

And that was when I had my insight into the true nature of the problem. It was the fact that what I think of as a “block” is larger-scale than what the Block Editor treats as a block.

So I went back to my Tiles ACF field group, stripped out the repeater functionality and created a Tile ACF field group. Now you’re building one tile at a time, it has all of the previous benefits of ACF’s dynamic integration of content with template functionality, it seems to correctly fit the definition of a “block” in the WordPress sense, and you can still have a flexible presentation of multiple tiles in a group… just using Block Editor “groups” to achieve that.

I still have more to learn and questions to answer (followed by more questions to ask and then answer), but I feel like this was a major step forward in finding a way to merge the benefits of ACF with the… inevitability, I guess, of the Block Editor.