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.
I’ve already reviewed the default blocks in WordPress plus nine other collections, with Stackable winning most head-to-head battles. I’m in the market for something that will do interesting tables without having to generate them from a database, but I’m also always open to new Block collections.
Let’s go through the collection of blocks:
Accordion: it is nice, simple, has a header and colour options, but I already have a good one with Stackable and an even better one with Kadence. Pass.
Alert: I’m impressed, as it is a nice simple box with a spot for a title and a background in one of four main preset styles and colours, although the colours can be altered. I’m tempted to keep it around just because it is a quick way to do a text box with light colours in it.
Author: Like many other profile boxes, nothing special.
Carousel: I have no need for a carousel as I use NextGen Gallery and it isn’t compatible. But in addition, for some reason, the images I inserted didn’t seem to line up properly for the top and bottom.
Click to Tweet: Not bad, prepopulate some text you want people to share, they click, and it will copy to Twitter along with a link to your page. Another I have no need for.
Collage: This is a really cool block, where you can have 4 or 5 pics laid out for you like a photo book, with a bit of overlap. Cool way to do a layout. I can’t think what I would use it for, but it’s different.
Dynamic HR: If you were into HTML, you’d remember HR was the code for a horizontal line. Otherwise you’d have no idea what this was. And it’s pretty bland…dots or a line, coloured, thickness.
Event: Wow, this is terrible. Bad layout, almost no styling, no box around it. You could do better on a typewriter.
Features: Logo / icon, title, text. Nothing special.
Food & Drink: If you were doing a menu, great little block. Section heading, title for the item along with icons for popular, spicy, vegetarian, adjustable sizes and fonts, prices, descriptions.
Form: Defaults for Contact, RSVP or Event, nothing special.
GIF: inserting from GIPHY, already covered with other plugins as standard embed.
GIST: inserting code from GITHUB, just as easily covered by code blocks, although I suppose it would be live update, no use for it.
Hero: Call to action with two buttons, nothing special.
Highlight: Simple line of highlighted text…which you could do in any paragraph block?
Icon: Pretty simple set of icons to choose from, hard to tell, you can’t see them all, change colour and size. Yawn.
Logos & Badges: Quick way to insert images from the media library, but for no special purpose other than perhaps to show them in grayscale? IDK.
Map: Standard insert from Google.
Masonry: Nothing special, and only works with default media library.
Media Card: Decent layout, you can insert video, but limited layout options.
Offset Gallery: Okay, nothing special, just irregular gallery.
Posts: Nothing special.
Post Carousel: Nothing special.
Pricing Table: This is the one that I really hoped would lead somewhere. It made it sound like you could do a sophisticated table. Nope, just pricing boxes.
Row: Actually it’s simple columns.
Services: Same as pricing table but with images.
Shape Divider: Eight choices, not bad, nothing fancy.
Share: Simple sharing icons.
Social profiles: Mirror image of Share for your own profiles.
Stacked gallery: You rarely see this but it is a gallery with all the images one above the other, full width. Or you could just insert them individually and have more control over them.
Wow. So I was mostly interested in the “Pricing Table” which turned out to be simply boxes side by side. The rest are okay, nothing very robust, a tier-2 set of blocks overall. I could use the Alert or the Collage, they’re different, but not enough to warrant leaving the whole collection installed for two blocks I will rarely use.
Famous last words could be added to that title — “…for the last time…”. When I upgraded and revamped my whole site awhile ago, and converted everything over to the latest version of WordPress which includes blocks, one of the pieces that I left unresolved was what to do about the gallery layout for my photo gallery. Thousands of photos are in the database and on the site, and I’m not editing any of those.
No, what was on the block for possible editing was the actual pages for individual galleries. I’ve been slowly converting from an old site running Piwigo over to WordPress anyway. The old site had 2005-2013 or so; the new site conversion had made it through 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008 (general), and most of my wedding photos (with the honeymoon still outstanding). A huge whack of files to be sure, but again, only about 12-15 gallery pages per year for 4 years. Call it 50-60 pages.
The problem is that the new site config did not work very well with my old pages (the first 50-60). I had dumped a specific video plugin that wasn’t loading consistently correctly, and I wasn’t even sure I liked the various layouts and colours for the pages. Not to mention that there’s an upgrade to the individual galleries themselves to make them more WordPress v5.5 compatible.
The “right” solution is to bite the bullet, fix the 50 pages and move on. And since I truly mean for this to be the last time I go back and revamp any design stuff, at least not by myself (I could pay someone someday, I suppose, if I did a major overhaul), I want it done right.
So while I run the site and do all the work for the photo gallery, I like to pretend that I am sharing it with my wife and son. Which means — lucky wife that she is — she gets to have views on the layout and how it looks for those pages.
I did a quick layout, sent it to her about 3 weeks ago, and silence. She was busy at the time, forgot about it, finally remembered it and sent me views about a week ago. Today, I took the time to go back, open a page, review her comments (bigger, more prominent prose) and make the changes. I then tested it on a couple of pages, designed a reusable block so that I can make all the pages look the same going forward, found an easy way to make a tweak to an existing layout so I don’t have to reset a whole bunch of stuff, and saved it. Andrea approved, I’m ready for future production.
One page down, 50+ to go. I’ve also figured out a way to correct a bunch of other photo issues I was having, so even the workflow is improved. Nice.
Today I choose to revise my gallery layout, ready for replication for other months / galleries.
That doesn’t seem like much of a choice, does it? I mean, how hard is it to blog? Or why is it significant?
For me, it was an actual choice today. Well, almost last night really. I was thinking, “It’s the weekend…and although I’ve started the “Today I Choose” self-challenge, did I want to perhaps adjust it so it was only a Monday-Friday thing?” Could I do the Seinfeld method of the longest chain if it was 5d on and 2d off?
So I debated whether I would blog today, Saturday. Things are a bit odd already with the “choice” challenge I gave myself. I spend the day doing my choices, I write up the posts at night of the choice I made that day, but then I write in the “present tense” even though I already chose. I’ve been playing with it in my mind, honestly, whether I should go back and change all of them to the past tense grammar to be “Today I chose”.
Except that isn’t quite the right nuance. I am not writing about a choice I *made* today, I am writing about the future-orientation of the choice, that today and everyday I am choosing to go beyond the minimum in some area of my life, actively and consciously choosing to do something that I want to do.
And I won’t lie, it’s hard to know what to write about each night. I could have written about making whole wheat bread today, or a trivia game we played tonight online as a family team (alas, we came 4th, but we’re blaming it on technical glitches). Or a few other choices.
But the one that felt like the biggest choice to me today was whether to blog about choice at all. I already blogged about an article I liked (https://polywogg.ca/articles-i-like-10-small-habits-that-have-a-huge-return-on-life/), so it’s not a question about blogging in general, I have no issues with doing that any day of the week and twice on Sunday. Literally, in some cases.
It was a question if I would keep the TIC series going or wait until Monday. I decided that I wasn’t satisfied with the idea that Monday to Friday I would work at making conscious choices and on Saturday and Sunday I would slack off, or turn my brain off, or whatever. It doesn’t count as keeping the chain going if I drop a couple of links on weekends.
So, today I choose to keep the chain going and to blog about my choices.
