dpevents

There currently exists two ways to pour text into a block. One is to use a classic block, the other is to use a code block. It makes this possible.

     C                 Csus4
When rain has hung the leaves with tears 
  C                Csus4
I want you near to kill my fears
   C             F      G7      C       G7
To help me leave all my blues behind

The difference is the classic block allows this:

     C                 Csus4
When rain has hung the leaves with tears 
  C                Csus4
I want you near to <strong>kill my fears</strong>
   C             F      G7      C       G7
To help me leave all my blues behind

I apply a background color immediately after creating the container. It helps me see the container’s location. I remove or change the color when I’m finished. It is a very frustrating block because it is all but invisible and difficult find to hover over. The structure icon helps but it often shows only a subset of the structure depending on where in the document you are scrolled to.

An unsatisfactory remediation was to deactivate WordPress Contact Forms by Cimatti which solved both the REST problem and the loopback problem. This plugin has not had an update in quite a while and I’m looking for a replacement, but if you need a project, install the current version. I’m disappointed because it was a forms plugin that didn’t hold back the most useful features I needed as a goad to encourage the user to buy the annually renewable “pro” version. I’ve learned to stay away from plugins that are “lite” version because what we all want is behind the ubiquitous annual paywall.

This seems to be where the latest crop of Gutenberg block providers are going and thank you no, not falling for that clickbait. Atomic Blocks by example has been kicked to the curb but only because enough of the blocks are serially unstable as to make it a PITA. They are too soon in an environment that is sketchy at best. I haven’t verified this yet, but I think the parsing of block boundaries which are HTML structured comments are bewildered by incremental changes. Particularly so with nested blocks. This is a historical problem of relying on PCRE regular expressions that are not properly anchored. I can’t say that is the case here, but that is what it looks like when reviewing the code in the code editor.

I don’t know if the various vendors have their own name space that is centrally managed (think ICAAN) for ad hoc block elements, but if not the case this entire exercise is headed into a realm of chaos. I’m recalling the madness of DLL libraries in early versions of Windows (2.1) and VisualBasic.

Back to the original remediation question – even though the tests fail the processes do not. So for now I’m leaving the Cimatti forms tool in place.

And since I’m on a bit of a rant, well intentioned, I assure you, be very careful of committing to block vendors because if you over-commit and later find you don’t like them or they fold their tent, thanks to Gutenberg’s model you have hell to pay to undo all the content registered to that block vendor. Converting the flagged blocks to HTML is a fool’s errand.

• This reply was modified 6 years, 3 months ago by dpevents.

I’ve just had an epiphany and please forgive me my sharing it, fresh and unvetted. This forum at which we are all gathered is not block oriented. Were that to happen on the occasion of the morning’s dawn heads would roll by lunch, don’t you think?

I do and I think more, that by choice we’d not be at this awkward place had the PTB (Powers that be) asked us.

Maybe it is time to give REST a rest. It is the evil protocol arbiter behind all this pretend stateless statefulness we’re fighting in browserland and perhaps the IOS app is the final frontier for the internet universal client started by NCSA’s Mosaic so many years ago (and I go back even farther to the Gopher) and Gutenberg is it’s last gasp.

Anyway, back to the great learning experience that is Gutenberg.

• This reply was modified 6 years, 3 months ago by dpevents.
• This reply was modified 6 years, 3 months ago by Jan Dembowski.

We survived the upgrade here to 5.0.2 and all is as well as it was at 4.9.9 except at 4.9.9 I was a bit of a WordPress expert and in many things WP to the benefit of my customers I still have, a consultable guru. I now feel like a crank-addled Pomeranian digging for long-forgotten bones in an endless field of broken glass. The promise of performance improvement is realized in that I am able to hit a wall faster than before. I cede that as a plus for promise-keeping.

Here is where I am, today. WordPress is not now the tool I would have chosen a decade+ ago for the solution to simple needs to communicate or pontificate, and the foundation upon which to offer my hosting services to alike-minded customers. And I get the feeling we are all now WordPress Deplorables caught in the wrong communications basket.

If I were ever to have wished to seek the difficult path I’d have stayed with Adobe’s Nightmare Weaver. But now here I am, a new pup in the litter of crank-addled Pomeranians trying to make a buck and to keep my customers my customers. No hard feelings… I guess.

I think a block aggregator will be for blocks what co-ops were for dairy farmers and apple orchardists – no branding. And someone has to sort out fairly overloaded names like “columns” or “Justified Flow”. When you have ad hoc providers you get ad hoc organization. I do like that Atomic Blocks uses AB in their block names for that reason. May haps the stellar thinkers at wordpress could do for block builders what ICANN does for host/ip distribution. Keep things unique and traceable.

I finally installed the classic editor plugin but didn’t activate it for a few days. As expected nothing changed. I then activated it but left the block editor as the default. In fact I haven’t even used the classic editor yet. But serendipitously, many problems disappeared. The Events Calendar began behaving, for one. The venue dropdown is working and finding venues. I’m left wondering why this plugin is the equivalent of a pacemaker for the block editor’s heart.

Emboldened I installed Atomic Blocks and tried creating a new home page with two CTA buttons in a 2-column block. This is when I realized the block editor has weaponized my mouse left click button as each time I try to select one of the blocks a new paragraph block is created. It is useful to visit the page structure tool frequently to find and delete the sprinkling of empty paragraph blocks.

Then I decided I’d like to add a third column and CTA. And that’s when I found out I could not find a way to reorder the columns. I wanted the newest block to be in the center. I suppose I could try the code editor but I finally gave up on the idea when the CTA blocks were repeatedly infested with unrecoverable errors with this ominous message: “This block contains unexpected or invalid content” and which gave me the option to resolve (can’t find what that means in the user documentation) or Convert to HTML. The result regardless of what is selected is always to create an HTML scramble where the CTA block was that destroys the reason to use blocks, and once this transform takes place it is like vinyl siding – it is final. Then the hunt is on to delete the CTA blocks and the column block and start over (approaching tenth iteration) while recalling Einstein’s definition of madness. The column block is used for the sole reason that individual block such as the CTA cannot be placed side by side by mere mortals. This mere mortal has yet to figure out what the AB container block does and how it works. It is the will-o’-the-wisp of the block world and a frequent target of my newly weaponized mouse paragraph block launcher. These are some of the surprising user experiences I mentioned in the previous post.

If I could have one wish it would be to replace paragraph blocks with/or create a nestable flow block that accepts coherent streams of text paragraphs ala PageMaker, Interleaf, and FrameMaker. A flow block would provide options for the text in the flow in one divine click rather than stalking independent paragraphs like a stoat chasing voles. It would have to allow nesting to permit inserting images, tables, css, etc., and maybe even JS snippets whose scope is the current flow block.

EC updated to 4.7.2 and EC pro updated to 4.5.1 since the last post. Still no dropdown, the spinner spins, I can see json.php being called with each letter of venue I type. The equivalent venue dropdown without blocks enabled in EC settings works fine.

Same problem here but only with EC block editor option checked. wp5.01, EC 4.7.1, EC pro 4.5, PHP 7.2.10, Apache/2.4.6, maria-db 10.3.10. The venue panel spinner spins but never finds venues and the only option is to create.