Interesting that 'container queries' didn't come up in this discussion. They are going to be so powerful, when fully supported, and I wonder how they can be utilised in the block editor. Rather than thinking about screen widths, every module/block can determine their own breakpoints. Great content, thanks!

WordPress would be well served if it brought a marketer into these conversations. This interview was a classic example of inside out thinking, which is typical of engineers. This is what we have, lets tweak it a bit to make it better. A marketer considers the problems that exist in the marketplace and then asks the technology to solve the problem.

@jamiewp

Жыл бұрын

Could you expand on that thought?

@inn8ly

Жыл бұрын

@@jamiewp Yes, I can expand on this at length, but this may not be the best forum. When I audit websites for business owners, the most common issue I see isn't technical; it's an absence of strategy. The copy and layout are inside out. The site talks about the amazing things that the business does and expects the visitor to sort out where to find things and whether or not what the business does solves their problem. Marketers look at the customer segments and explore the problems they have. Then the site is designed to support each customer segment's journey; it makes it easy to find the information they need to solve their problem. If Automattic took this approach, they wouldn't be making incremental steps toward solving responsive and mobile menus. Over 60% of traffic is mobile. Site builders need a solution to this problem. Taking this a step further, if Automattic thought about WordPress as an OS, they'd build a solution that supports the DIY segment and refine the OS so developers can easily work with it. We're using Gutenberg. We like it and support its evolution. The challenge I'm seeing is that Gutenberg doesn't help either market segment very well. It's complicated for the DIY crowd and isn't a great solution for our custom builds.

@vaughanprint

Жыл бұрын

The whole tenor of the conversation around the block editor(and this is emphasised by the talk of intrinsic design) is that the focus is to return to Wordpress’s roots as a blogging platform and in a way ignore all the other types of websites that got hacked on top of the platform in the last decade or so. This is evidenced in looking at the latest version of WPTavern, on desktop, the main content width sits narrower than the width of the navigation element. In one way this wasn’t a top concern for Justin Tadlock when he was reworking the design. His priority would I expect have been for the reflow of content on devices, with the least effort, the result being best on mobile. The point of bringing in a marketeer in one way makes a bit of sense. My feeling from the Gutenberg project is that they didn’t go out and explore all the use cases for how Wordpress has been used since it’s inception. It was a case of we are all happy bloggers let’s disrupt and cater just for that of user. Yes, third parties such as Kadence have made valiant efforts to try to smooth the void of responsiveness but it just seems that they are always fighting the “we just want some rudimentary builder that lives nicely in this so called intrinsic design world” mentality. I live in hope that the block editor will eventually morph into something as useable as the better page builders or at least open up so that those builders can easily interface over the block builders so that we can keep building sites that are a bit more sophisticated.😮

A massive problem with the idea of intrinsic design, versus manual overrides, is that it requires the wordpress developer to know and cater for every reason why a user might use any feature. If you imagine a user has put two images side by side on desktop, perhaps images of book covers, did they do that to show off the book covers or did they intend them to act as button-like images. If the former, then they might be best displayed one above the other on mobile. If the latter, they might be best kept side by side. There is no way to determine what meaning and intention the user has. This applies even more when the user is attempting to work around some other limitation. You, the wordpress core team member can never know what you are preventing with your assumptions. So, yes there should be some smart default, but let the user override with manual controls for the situation they are in, which you cannot imagine.

So what do you do about responsive design? I’m not liking having the columns not controllable and letting the content fit where it fits the flow.

I am currently using wordpress as my UI design and server render tool, and i have a custom JS framework doing the interactivity and state management... what a game changer, no react, not headless stress.

@arberstudio

8 ай бұрын

this also means I can design exactly where the final product is going to be, and publish when it works as per requirements

@jamiewp

8 ай бұрын

👍

I'd prefer to move away from pixel value media queries but there definitely are situations where you need to be able to switch between settings depending on screen size. The cover block for example I believe needs an option for switching a background image out. Block visibility is also one I certainly need in some of my projects. Have a couple of sites that run ads and the ads themselves aren't responsive so you need to be able to hide the big ones and show smaller alternatives on smaller screens.

Good interview, it made it clear that WordPress is really at a junction in the website road, as mobile usage continues to grow ( and phones effectively format everything in the same way ) is there really any future for desktop layout websites that nobody uses and is it worth putting more resources into creating these when the next generation expects to just upload content on their mobile to a formated template. Another question of course is how does Wordpress adapt to the App Market, many larger companies now only want customers using their App, should WP be developing an App creation tool as well?

I get this intrinsic fluid responsive between screen size, but some blocks you need a bit of old fashioned breakpoints. For instance if your menu fills a section but before it goes onto 2 lines it breaks to the mobile menu. The core nav block seems to be very limited in some areas but does have some cool features too. It is the main reason I'm currently not using a block theme

Very good work!

Intrinsic design sounds cool, but it will be a heavy task for the developers behind it, I guess. The new block-based themes or patterns will be more niched or specific than classic themes, I expect. Interesting to hear it direcly from Automattic. Thank you Jamie for you efforts!

Columns get SO thin before they break when there’s more than 2. So I do agree that it depends on the content - including the number of columns!

How does one then customise the current mobile menu or is there a way for mobile menus to be customised with any other blocks plugin currently?

@jamiewp

Жыл бұрын

How would you like to customize it?

@MegaJonkelly

Жыл бұрын

@@jamiewp 🤣

WP 6.2 is definitely a great improvement, but I still can't emulate what my favourite classic theme can easily do. Thanks for fleshing out "intrinsic design" and why fully fledged mobile controls are not readily available. I can appreciate the long term goal, but in the meantime it's really painful to try and control responsive layouts. Fingers crossed that 6.3 will nail down some FSE shortcomings, but for now, I either stop using WP or find a decent FREE FSE extension plugin.

I think you'd need the best of both worlds for intrinsic as well as queries. For example, let's say someone wants to use an entirely different layout with different blocks on mobile, that don't even exist on desktop. Nowadays mobile development means you have custom mobile controls you probably only want to display on mobile. I think the best way forward is if there would be some sort of "state" where the "state" for desktop is what blocks you currently have setup in the full site editor, and for mobile you'd have a mobile state where you can have entirely different blocks setup just the way you want it to be. There could be blocks that benefit from intrinsic design, making it work on all screen sizes automatically, but being able to at least adjust which blocks are displayed where exactly and in which way for each viewport, would be a good way for designers to be able to fine-tune the experience on all different screen sizes. You can't just say, create everything on the desktop and have it automatically work on all other screen sizes, since other screen sizes usually also mean creating an entirely different design to begin with. There are entire industries marketed at focussing specifically on a specific viewport like for example mobile and these should have the capability of displaying something in a way different way then they would on desktop, even if that means not having the exact same content on both.

@jamiewp

Жыл бұрын

Great answer 👍

@simbaclaws_youtube

Жыл бұрын

@@jamiewp actually, I just build a plugin that does just that using 3 blocks: desktop, tablet and mobile. Anything put inside these blocks get conditionally rendered by php using a library called mobiledetect. I also made sure that when you switch the preview mode only the blocks for that viewport mode are displayed. The company I work for wants to use it internally, but I would love to at some point open source it if I'm allowed to. It's my approach to tackling the responsive control problem. The beauty in it is that you can still put blocks outside those blocks that can take advantage of intrinsic design. I called my plugin: adaptive blocks, for adaptive design. Hope that this can spark some inspiration to the core team. I'm also building a block based theme for a client, so I kind of had to tackle the problem somehow.

Very interesting! Jamie, I'd love to hear more about your thoughts on block collection plugins. Definitely some great collections of useful plugins but it seems like it is the wild west out there. Find My Blocks should be in core. If blocks where all labeled by source (publishpress, kadence, spectra, etc.) it would be easier to teach not-so-techies what to use. I feel like I have to use a collection for one feature and can't get all the rest of them turned off. ;-) I know, just use core, just use ONE collection on everything. Nice in theory, I don't find it practical . . . . BTW, your Woo blocks are amazing!

I don't now if my browser was bugging out, but it seems that rem and em font-sizes are treated as static in Gutenberg. It kind of defeats the purpose.

@jamiewp

Жыл бұрын

Yup sounds strange

Cool and knowledgeable as always. But why the fixed subtitles? They cover up so much of an interesting presentation …

Well, I love your videos because of how easy to understand and follow along but I have to admit this whole video was Greek to me. Didn't understand a word you two were talking about. 😀

@jamiewp

Жыл бұрын

Sorry about that

Numero uno.

🎉❤

I don't think that intrinsic design, as a general technique, is mature enough to be included in the world's largest CMS platform in the form of UI controls, in the same way that media queries would. It makes sense and has a lot of potential, sure, but it hasn't been fully realized in this kind of environment anywhere yet. What website builder is using it this way, especially at this scale? None, AFAIK. This is basically an experiment. My bet is that mixing intrinsic design with visual page building will, in practice, greatly restrict the core block's layout capabilities. But that remains to be seen, of course.

@vaughanprint

Жыл бұрын

It would need to become intrinsically more advanced.😮

Hopefully Container queries would become part of the system. Also, why not editing posts and pages in the site editor, which by the way is way better on 6.2? And hopefully woocommerce would be more block based, and stop jquery.... By the way, love your recreation design videos.

Trying to be Wix would be a giant step backwards for WordPress.

@vaughanprint

Жыл бұрын

I have used Wix in a recent project. It has its charms, if you the project isn’t big but I would agree it wouldn’t be the way to go for Wordpress. Each platform has its own strengths I guess.

Jamie there's a typo in your title it should be "Manager" (you can delete this comment afterwards if you want)

@jamiewp

Жыл бұрын

thank you - fixed 👍