I was out the door at 7:30 a.m., which is not that early NORMALLY, but in a COVID world, it is unheard of, in order to get to a health appointment with Andrea for 7:45 a.m. Easy for me, I watched Monk episodes on Prime while I waited.
Then drove Andrea home and went to McDonald’s to pick up a treat for the three of us — McMuffins for Andrea and I, hot cakes for Jacob. Then I was in meetings pretty much all day.
I don’t just mean a lot of meetings. I mean that I was in meetings most of the morning, went upstairs to grab lunch just after 2:00 p.m., ate at my desk while preparing for other meetings, did more work until almost 5:45 p.m., finished off some stuff on my computer in time for dinner at 6:30 p.m., and then was back to my PC at 7:00 p.m. for a night-time Ottawa Meetup for WordPress users.
The local group was presenting on Blocks, and since I’m struggling with a bit of block stuff, AND that I will eventually need to engage some of this community to help solve my WP problems, I need to make the effort to join in for their meetings when I’m available. I was practically asleep by 8:00 p.m. in my chair, and I can’t swear I didn’t nod off at one point.
Good presentation, got a lot of great info on things I didn’t know, flattening the learning curve in this instance, but it was 2 hours of extra learning tonight. Just in time to try out two collections while it was all still fresh in my mind.
I’m totally fried. Not completely in a bad way, just a really long day.
And tomorrow morning, it starts again with an early morning jaunt to pick up a telescope that is being donated to our astronomy group, so early morning volunteer work. Hopefully I can stay awake for some later meetings in the day!
I love block collections, and Qubely was apparently one I missed in my reviewing. Right up front, it adds a big IMPORT LAYOUT button up to the left of the content editor window, which is where they have links to various block patterns / mini layouts. There aren’t many free ones, but a lot of PRO ones are listed. That’s usually a huge red flag for me — an app that serves basically to market their other services.
The collection is large with 29 separate blocks. Let’s work our way through them one by one:
Accordion: Nothing flashy but totally functional;
Advanced List: In all fairness, it does give you some nice options for styling an ordered number list (like light-blue circles around the numbers or colouring the rows, but I was REALLY hoping it would do more advanced list things like letters;
Advanced Text: More controls than a paragraph block, with built-in Title / Heading and sub-heading options, as well as basic animation;
Animated Headline: I haven’t seen anything like this in any other collection. You can write a sentence fragment like “I am a ” and then put a series of adjectives in a list of words to rotate like great, funny, sincere, etc. and then put a sentence fragment like “cheerleader” as your last part of the sentence. And it will show the words I AM A GREAT CHEERLEADER as the opening, then change the word GREAT to something else, all animated. It’s pretty good. I have ZERO use for it, but it’s impressive;
Block Wrapper: Yep, it’s a container / wrapper to go around blocks to give more control, add some grouped animation, etc;
Button: It comes with layout options that look great, and nothing resembling it once imported;
Button Group: Did you like the Button Block? How about side by side in columns?;
Contact Form: Basic contact form layout, no better or worse than those that come with Contact plugins;
Counter: Simple count up block, set the number and the duration;
Divider: At first it seemed kind of basic, until you click on the line, and see another 27 different tweaks of the line with curlicues, leaves, etc. None that I would probably use, or not many, but at least there are options;
Google Map: The Map block is either really odd or really amazing. It asks for a Google API key like every other Map block does, but then it shows you a live map without it, even though it limits what you can do to style it without the API. That’s worth the price of admission right there, as there are some issues with configuring a Google API, with lots of people having little to no success getting it right;
Heading: Nothing flashy but allows you to have a sub-heading;
Icon: Basic block, with options to wrap icon in a circle that is filled or open;
Icon List: Good list with options for hover animation, lines, borders, etc.;
Image: Pretty simple options, extensive configurations although all pretty basic;
Image Comparison: Good functionality, comparing two images side by side with a slider to show the changes;
Info Box: Basic box with graphic, multiple types of lines, simple layouts, typography options, etc;
Pie Progress: Basic styling but mostly an ad to buy the pro mode;
Post Grid: This one is very odd…it puts in the main posts, and then paginates the entire rest of your site. Which for me is 350 pages, all showing as clickable blocks;
Pricing: A pretty good pricing block with just about every option you could ever want including currencies, discounts, badges, colours, typography, etc.;
Progress Bar: Nothing fancy, but it does allow striping to the bar (most don’t) and some animation for the block;
Row: Basic single row layout with multiple configurations for # and layout of columns;
Social Icons: Surprisingly ugly layouts compared to other options like Share Any or Jetpack;
Tabs: Basic functionality, nothing exceptional;
Table of Contents: Same functionality as most, with a few extra styling options for background images, hiding the titles, icons, etc.;
Team: Standard profile box with image, name, description / title, and social media icons;
Testimonial: Great box, has all the basic options plus an option to add a rating with stars;
Timeline: Decent functionality for vertical timeline, with titles, dates, icons for the connectors, etc.; and,
Video Popup: Good options, with ability to choose internal / local or external videos, but not to add closing buttons to the popup or back buttons.
Overall, none of them are ones that I “must have”. Advanced List, Animated Headline, Divider, and the Pricing Box stand out as offering options that not all the other collections offer. But the real question mark is Google Maps. I don’t NEED it on my site, but if I did, this is the one I would use since it can run without an API key. Somehow.
Previous readers of the blog know that I am intrigued every time I see a new block collection and want to see what they have to offer. I was looking at a new post tool and it listed all the collections it was compatible with, most of which I had seen. But it listed one called “Kioken Blocks” which I had never heard of, so I wanted to give it a try.
It comes with 19 blocks, and so let’s see how they do on my site…
Accordion: Simple vertical accordion block, click to expand;
Container Row: A common block in the higher-end collections, this gives you a quick layout of one row x multiple columns of different size and proportions. It not only has animation options, it lets you customize the look for five different screen sizes, and lots of tweaks to backgrounds for six different columns;
Divider Plus: This is a REALLY well-done block. It has all the standard separator line options — dots, full width, short distance, stars, etc. But then it offers lines with text (you enter the text, it spaces it between two lines across the page), or an icon between two lines, etc.;
Fancy Buttons: Decent enough tweaks, but major selling feature would be that it allows for some transition animation, although I have no desire for such functionality;
Features: Simple box layout to draw attention to features in parallel columns;
Google Maps: Standard block for inserting a Google map with an API key;
Icon: Standard fare, lets you insert icons, although it will let you do up to 10, which is higher than most;
Image Box: Most collections have an image box, this is one of the few that gives you hover and animation options, plus all the normal tweaking options;
Kinetic Wrapper: Same as most collections “group” or “container” options, with added animation;
Kinetic Posts: Options to show recent posts in different layouts with FIs, but most seemed way too big for the layout, but some different options than most;
Numbers Counter: Simple “count up” block to go up to a user-entered value;
Open Table Form: A good layout if you want to embed an Open Table form for a restaurant booking;
Price Line: A basic box with a spot for a title and a description beside it, and the price right-justified;
Split Headings: I wasn’t sure what this was at first, or why I would care, but it basically allows you to have a multi-line heading without needing line wrap;
Tabs: Very basic block;
Testimonials Carousel: Basic testimonial layouts with image, content description, name, title, all wrapped in a carousel;
Video Box: Designed for Vimeo or YouTube insertion, standard fare; and,
Visual List: If you don’t want to use a table, but you want to arrange some items in a list, how about 40 rows by 6 columns? Well, not really, as it limits you to 40 items overall. So more like up to 40 items spread over up to 6 columns. Still, pretty slick setup if you had a bunch of info to list in a grid.
They are mostly all decently-rendered and designed, with a few standouts. Most of them have an extra animation option, which most block collections do not do. And their extra 19th block is for Kioken Elements which lets you load a lot of pre-designed block patterns, with options to upgrade to pro modes.
A decent collection, but none of them screamed “must-have”. If I had to identify the best three, I would say Divider Plus, Visual List, and Split Headings as all three are relatively unique to Kioken, haven’t seen those in other block collections. Unfortunately, I don’t really need any of them enough to keep the collection around.
I am constantly on a search for new blocks to make my workflow more consistent, particularly in areas where I don’t even know I could improve things. So I’ve already reviewed 11 block collections, and this is number 12. Let’s see what I get out of it:
Accordion: Expandable, but doesn’t seem to be collapsible except by clicking another one.
Advanced Spacer: Yep, it’s for controlling space and not much else.
Anchor: Useful instead of coding your own.
Banner: Same as headers in most other collections, very large image with the ability to put text over it AND you can add 6 transition effects when you hover.
Button Group: Not a bad deployment, generating multiple buttons side by side, all individually controlled for text, colours, links.
Circular Progress Bar: Options to change colour and thickness, plus value, but not SHOW the value?
Contact Form: Basics, nothing special.
Countdown: Set future time and date, and countdown by years, months, weeks, days, hours, minutes, and seconds, with some typography but not very sophisticated designs.
Counter: Animated count up to a total.
Custom Post Type: Basic options but threw JSON errors trying to load excerpt.
Google Maps: Enter your key, insert your map.
Heading: Custom heading, not default ones, allows you to do font typography plus colours.
Icon: Simple insertion, a bunch to choose from as defaults, nothing exceptional.
Icon box: Centred, heading, description.
Image Box: Main image, doesn’t seem like it does much at first, but it has a bunch of animations on hover.
Image Hotspot: Adds tooltip so you can click in various places on a larger image.
Image Slider: Decent setup, can even just have 1 image, not a slider in that case.
Image Stack: It seems basic at first, but then you have different layout options with a partial overlap like index cards.
Instagram: Connect an Instagram account.
Mailchimp: Couldn’t try this one, don’t have MC key.
Media and Text Slider: I have no need for it, but I like the way it loads them — tabbed for each “slide”. And lots of tweaks available.
Person: Basic profile box. Heading, subtitle, text and description AND their social links.
Post Carousel: Basic options but threw JSON errors trying to load excerpt.
Post Slider: Basic options but threw JSON errors trying to load excerpt.
Price Box: Few options, nothing special.
Price List: Again, I was hoping this would allow me an easy way to do a long table. It had an option for an image, leaders from name to the price, not bad. But only basic tweaking options.
Progress Bar: Simple horizontal line, set the %, it will show in two colours but can’t vary the width of the line but you can animate the load.
Recent Posts: A selection of options to show a list of your last x number of posts in varying detail, although it throws a JSON error trying to show excerpts.
Section: Lots of options to put in backgrounds.
Social Links: Basic options plus some outlining, nothing special.
Table: Relatively simple but powerful, and you can change table settings or cell settings, merge or split, seems great. But you can’t change the typography. WTH?
Table of Contents: Decent, nothing special, although it does give an ordered list option.
Tabs: Basic options, some tweaks, nothing special.
Template Library: Up until here, it was a rather ho-hum collection but the template library is pretty well done with lots of nicely done options. My favorites include SubHero 4. I feel like I could have used that for a nice Blockquote layout, maybe I just like the background image.
Testimonial: Basic layout.
Timeline Block: Alternating blocks with image, header, description, and minimal styling.
Toggle: Seems identical to the accordion.
Video Popup: Only for externally hosted videos or if you have a direct link to the locally-hosted ones, plus loads in lightbox.
Overall, I’m impressed with the level of tweaking but underwhelmed with the overall consistency between blocks. Some have great options, and really stand out. Others are extremely basic with almost no tweaking. I was hopeful for the table block, and it comes REALLY close, but doesn’t allow typography changes. Although I could wrap it in a larger container that would handle that to set the defaults.
Of the close to 40 blocks, I really like their Template Library, and they have decent options for the Anchor, Button Group, Media and Text Slider (even if I have no use for it), and the Table. Not sure if the collection is worth keeping though, unless I’m going all in on their table. Other than one of the nice templates in their gallery, I already have options to do all the rest.
I’ll keep it around as a potential option in the short-term, not sure about the long-term.
I have a dream, except my dream is a lot smaller than racial equality. My dream today is simply that I can create a nice table on my WordPress site that doesn’t go crazy.
So let’s start with the nature of the problem. I have a post, about the top hits of 1943. It’s part of a long-term project I am working on that will eventually have me review all the Billboard hits from 1943 up to the present. Fun, right? Okay, maybe not, but I find some of it pretty interesting. I did the first year as a test, 1943, and while Billboard’s list wasn’t exactly up and running yet, I ended up with a combination of several lists and 117 songs to review. I reviewed them, I sorted them, I put them in a table.
A table that is 5 columns wide and more than 100 rows long.
It’s simple, it organizes the data, it’s boring. I would LIKE to be able to intersperse some comments here and there. Actually, I’d rather it looked like a playlist that people could click on, but that seems doubtful at the moment (Apple is not my friend). Regardless, it is a LONG table. And I have four options to display the data:
Use the default TABLE block that comes with WordPress. I can use that block, but it isn’t the best to work with, and styling is a problem at times.
Use an Advanced Table block but it REALLY doesn’t seem to like the new editor much. It might be a conflict with something, but I can’t tell what or why.
Use TablePress. This is a really powerful tool for making great-looking tables, but it comes at a cost — the table is not actually IN the page, it is generated by a database and all the data is stored in the database first. It’s easy to populate, I have the data in Excel already, but I’d prefer NOT to put it in a table that is generated. I would much rather a flat table that I can edit and add comments throughout. You can’t do those kinds of edits or tweaks if the data is just generated.
Ditch the table and use a list format. I could do this easily enough, since I have it in an Excel Table, I can easily reformat the same data into a nice “line of text” such as “##. Singer name – Song (Company)” and just paste it into a set of bullets. Anywhere I want to edit the table/list, I just add a couple of hard returns to break the list and type away.
None of those options are what I want. So I posted a Q on a FB group that has some good designers in it, and one guy got “immediately” what I was looking to do. He even noticed there was a problem with the page which might have something to do with why it wasn’t loading completely correctly, and I’ve fixed that part at least. But the table? Neither of us have a working solution.
Yet. But he is also willing to help look for an answer.
I found a great tool tonight that has some really nice “blocks” in it for doing different things in WordPress. I’ve reviewed 10 block collections previously, found some I really liked, and some that I absolutely LOVE from Stackable. So when I saw there was a great little collection called CoBlocks that had a LOT of blocks in it, a decent number of installs, and some positive reviews, AND it has something that looks like a “pricing table” where you could list a variety of information items, it sounded great. So I went down the rabbit hole of testing the set of blocks (Reviewing CoBlocks for WordPress). Alas, no joy in Mudville.
I’m also going to try GetWid (a collection of blocks that also sounds promising) and Ninja Tables (it also looks like it generates the tables the way TablePress does, but perhaps not, hard to tell yet).
There’s a simple way to do this, I know there is. I just have to get there without having to fight with the block codes I have. As I said, I have a dream…
Today I choose to search for the right tool for the job.
