Most of the enhancements are still experimental, so you would need to enable the Grid Interactivity feature via the Gutenberg > Experiments screen. (or use this Playground instance to start testing)
If you have further discussion or questions in context of this Hallway Hangout, you can leave a comment here or start chatting in the #outreach channel on Slack Slack is a Collaborative Group Chat Platform https://slack.com/. The WordPress community has its own Slack Channel at https://make.wordpress.org/chat/..
Transcript (AI generated)
This component. So this is the hardware hangout on exploring grid layout. And Isabel Bryson is gonna demo what’s come what’s possible in WordPress 6.6 and we also when are going to discuss what’s coming in 6.7 so take it away. Isabel,
yes. Okay, so I’m going to share my screen, and what am I? Can you see my screen? Okay, yes, actually, not. Okay. So,
sukat, there
are many things that I can show you. I can’t actually, when big it said that I was going to show you all the cool layouts that you can do. I can’t actually show you all the cool layouts, because there’s so many things, so many different things that you can do in terms of layout with these basic tools that, oh, I was afraid of I say that I’m not a designer, so I’m doing my best here, but I’ll show you the tools that are available, and I can show you what they do. And then you can go and like, make all the cool layouts that you can think of with them. Okay, so first, what’s shipping in 6.6 I’m I think I’m just gonna pop that over there. Okay, what’s shipping in 6.6 is a grid block which was experimental in the Gutenberg plugin A plugin is a piece of software containing a group of functions that can be added to a WordPress website. They can extend functionality or add new features to your WordPress websites. WordPress plugins are written in the PHP programming language and integrate seamlessly with WordPress. These can be free in the WordPress.org Plugin Directory https://wordpress.org/plugins/ or can be cost-based plugin from a third-party for quite a while, I’m going to say a few months, maybe even longer than that, but we’ve all we’ve enhanced it. So for 6.6 the gridlock has a bit more functionality than it did up until recently, in the plugin. And I’m not going to say we’re shipping a grid layout, because that the actual layout had already shipped. So the layout has been in core Core is the set of software required to run WordPress. The Core Development Team builds WordPress.. The layout block support has been in core since 6.2 or 6.3 I think, and it’s just been available as something that you could add to any custom block that you might build. And there was one, there was one block using it so far, which is the post template block. So post template has a sort of list variant and the grid variant, and that grid variant was created with the grid layout, but now we have a grid block, which is, it’s basically just a variation of the group block, and it creates a grid layout. So you can, you can add it. So when you gonna just go here, you can, you can type a group and and you’ll see the grid as one of the featured layouts, featured variations of the group. Or you can just directly type grid from the inserter, and it’ll appear. And I’m just going to show you the ones I’ve already got ready here. So the grid that was in the plugin until recently, only had, really only two options, which was auto. The Auto option will create a grid with as many columns as will fit in in the container given a minimum column width. And that’s the sort of default. The default What should I say? It’s 9pm words are failing me. So the default state of the grid is this auto layout, and it will resize automatically. So when, when your grid container becomes smaller, you’ll have as many columns as will fit in there, given that the minimum width is, in this case, it’s 15 REM. But it could be anything. It could be in pixels. It could be an M or REM, okay. And then you have the other option, which is manual, which are is slightly different, because you for the manual grid, you’ll define a number of columns, and the grid will always have that number of columns no matter what size it is. So you can CCC, this is the manual grid. So in comparison with the auto grid, which resizes and the blocks reflow. The manual grid will will always have the same number of columns. And in addition to that, so this is these, these sort of two manual, auto variations were the ones that were initially shipped in the block layout support. And the the new, the new, new thing that we did for 6.6 is the ability to resize the children of the grid. So before you could only have you can only have a grid with items, basically with items only with having the span of one column and one row. So each. Item would just fit neatly into one grid cell, and anything else that you wanted to do on top of that, you’d have to basically write your custom CSS Cascading Style Sheets., which is possible, but it’s a bit of a pain. And that’s not what the block editors of app you want to be able to do stuff with the UI User interface. And so we came up with, not, well, we, I said, basically, I and one of my colleagues, Rob Anderson, we too, worked on this for few months, up to 6.6 so that’s the particular we that. I mean when I say we, in this case, and we created this thing, this sort of these resize handles, where you can actually change the size of the block by pulling on the handles, and it will become bigger or smaller as you resize it with the handles. So that’s sort of a handy way of like being able to visually change the whole sort of look of the grid and play around and move things around stuff. Yeah, so that’s, I guess, the so to make, to make that workable. I don’t know if you can see because it doesn’t have very high contrast, but hopefully you can see that there are little grid lines visible. So in addition to the handles, the handles are more visible because they have this sort of bright blue color, but there are these sort of thinner grayish grid lines that are running through the whole grid. And those are, those are that they show you what the tracks of the grid are and how many cells the item that you have is taking up. Yeah, so pretty much. I mean, this is what’s going to ship in, 6.6 I’d add that this is kind of a detail when you have them. So the auto grid that reflows when you resize the screen, it’s sort of, there’s a little bit of responsive behavior built into it, so that the items that span multiple columns and rows will also resize as you resize the grid. Because if that didn’t happen, you’d end up with a very, very messy layout. So that’s we just built that in to sort of so that it would work a bit more efficiently. And that is, if you’re curious about that sort of thing, we built that behavior using Container queries. And so the items inside a grid will resize depending not on the size of the viewport, but on the size of the actual grid. So if you stick this grid into, say, a roadblock that has other things in it, and suddenly it becomes really small, then the items will reflow inside the grid. Yeah. So this, I’m pretty much this is what’s shipping in, 6.6 does anyone have any questions at this point? I
Are you big? You’re muted so
we don’t have any questions mute in the chat, but if you have any question, just be free and unmute yourself and just so you don’t have to type it, it’s probably easier. This is a highway hand, so it’s not as strictly structured as a developer. So you’re welcome to,
yeah, yeah. I mean, please, if there’s anything that you don’t know, what you’re wondering, if it’s possible to do this or that, please, please ask. Because I’ve let I’ve been working on this thing for so long that I can no longer see the things which might be obvious to other people. It’s like, oh, that’s not intuitive. Or like, how do you do this? Or can you do that? I’m like, you know, I’ll probably forget to say stuff. So please ask all the questions that you might have.
Yeah, I have a question. So container query are relatively new for browsers, right? Are they now supported by every browser? Yeah,
they’ve got decent support. Let me see actually, do we have, can I use contain the query? So there we go, can I use container queries? Okay, it doesn’t look too bad. It’s 90, almost 92% of browsers. So the thing is, yeah. And the thing is this, the thinking behind using Container queries in this particular instance is that, are they? If a browser doesn’t support them, they’ll just not work. And then any items that have, you know, multiple column span will sort of throw off the the layout of the grid a bit. Because what happens so when you have a grid, what. Where a certain number of columns is defined. And when you have this sort of auto reflowing grid, say, you know, you say minimum column width is 15 REM, and then the window starts going down, and the grid becomes smaller. Then, then, say, becomes smaller than 30 REM. So it can’t, it really can’t fit two columns in anymore, so it’d go down to one column. But if an item inside that grid has a spat is spanning more than one column, then the grid goes, Ah, I can’t go down to one column because I have a multi column item in here. And so it does this weird, dodgy thing where it keeps the first column with the width that you that you stipulated. So it’ll be like a 15 REM column, and then it’ll create like an a second auto column. But that column will not have 15 REM because that no longer fits, and so it’ll just be like a very narrow second column. And so this means that layouts can look extremely weird. And that was the reason why we thought, let’s do a container query, because you never know where, where the grid’s going to be. And so this can happen, like, if you’re using a grid inside another container, then media queries won’t really do the job there. And so container query was the best way to solve the problem. And I guess for the small percentage of browsers that don’t support it, I mean, the worst that can happen is the layout will look slightly off. You won’t lose any content. All the blocks will still be displayed. It’s just there. Some might be bigger than others. You know, it might not be of a uniform size sort of thing.
Excellent. Any other question.
Nope. Keep on going.
Okay, so, um, I want to also show you the stuff that I’m really excited about right now, which is what I’ve been building in the past few days, which is what is hopefully going to ship with, 6.7 now, I say hopefully, because you never know this is WordPress, and this thing that we’re Building is highly experimental. So the first part of it is, and I think the biggest piece here, which is what we in. I think, I mean, when we started working on this sort of multi span thing, we thought it would be really neat to get this into 6.6 but then it became obvious that we wouldn’t have time to make it stable. It’s pretty complex thing to build, so now we hopefully targeting it, targeting it at 6.7 and that is the ability to position items inside the grid. So I can show you what I mean here. So this is what I’m showing you now. Is in Gutenberg trunk A directory in Subversion containing the latest development code in preparation for the next major release cycle. If you are running "trunk", then you are on the latest revision., but it’s behind an experiment flag, so you can go, where are we? Okay, so you, you know you’re in here. You’ve got the Gutenberg plugin. You open up this experiments page, and you select, you check this box which says grid interactivity, and you save it, and then you go back to your editor, and you can see all the new stuff that was merged yesterday in the pull request. And it’s going to so the RC One of the final stages in the version release cycle, this version signals the potential to be a final release to the public. Also see alpha (beta). for 18.7 was just today, so this is going to be behind that experiment flag in 18.7 for anyone who wants to try. So what we have here is a grid. Yep, this is a grid, and it’s set to manual. You’ll notice that beside the column control, now there’s a row control in here, so you can define the number of columns and rows that you want. And these grid items are not positioned as they usually are on other grids. So in the grids that we saw previously, all the grid items are sort of side by side. And if you if I make this one smaller, then something else will flow in and take its place. It’s there’s never an empty space in this grid. The items all sort of follow on another, so they’re being auto placed inside the grid. And now what we have is the ability to place items manually in certain parts of the grid. So you could grab one of these and move it somewhere else, or you can use these. We change the block movers a bit when you’re inside this manual mode of grid. And so you can actually use the block movers to move up, move left, move down. You can move things on top of other things, which can be really confusing. If the blocks are precisely the same size, it’s this is one of the things that I’m hoping that we’ll get plenty of testing and feedback on. And folks. Will, you know, give us their opinions on if it works well, because we do want to provide the ability for blocks to overlap other blocks, right? Because you could, you could maybe have a really big block, and then maybe you want this block to fit on top of, oh, wait, that went under. This shoe is handy when you’re doing this sort of thing, because you can move things in markup order. Wait, where are we? Where’s the other block? Okay, see, this is one of those things that is basically the reason why this is an experiment. Okay, so where did you go. So we haven’t got the interaction 100% right here. I reckon this could still use some work. Okay, so say this, this picture takes up four cells, and I can drag this picture, maybe put it on top of that one. And so you can have an overlap, and you can have sort of partial overlaps, because maybe this picture could be a bit bigger, too, and then it were what happened there was supposed to overlap. The other one. Never mind smoking a bit buggy. Okay, still an experiment. This is what happens when you have experiments. They’re usually not very stable, but it’s super exciting, because this can allow you to do almost anything. You can create all sorts of like, really cool layouts with this. So this, I beg you please go and test this and write issues if you come across bugs and tell me how we can improve it. Because this really needs, I think this really needs some real world use. And and folks going, Oh, hey, this doesn’t work. Or maybe it should do this instead. Or maybe we could add this functionality, and it would help a lot. You know, that sort of feedback is really useful. And so auto So, yeah, so what? What’s happening here, basically, is we, we hijacked that manual mode where you previously you would only define the number of columns, and we make it work in a way that you can now place all the grid cells wherever you like. The auto mode is still the same as it was. I think this is this grid is in auto mode. Yeah, that’s in auto mode. So auto mode still works the same. It’s still resizable. Uh, manual mode is not resizable. But there is a pull request in progress at this very moment that I would also ask you to check out and test if you’re feeling adventurous, and that is a pull request that will add, it’s a bit more responsiveness to this, to this, so I can show you that. Ah, yeah, this is the one that has the recycling I’ve got, like branches in different tabs, trying not to get confused with which is which. Okay, so in this pull request, this is in progress so highly, highly unstable, I’m hoping that maybe it can be merged behind the experimental flag in the next few days to see if more folks might be able to test it. So this is so still our manual grid with our items positioned wherever we like, but now you’ll see that in addition to the columns and rows, we also have a minimum Column Width field, and that allows us to define a minimum column width, which, in addition to the number of columns, means that our grid will always have maximum number of columns, whatever we define. But minimum column width means that when the columns become less than that width, they will resize and reflow, and so you’ll end up with basically a one column grid. And the other thing is, we’re experimenting with this so that folks can still have a way of defining a grid with fixed number of columns, like the manual mode that is currently in core and about to ship in 6.6 where you can only define the number of columns. You can’t position the elements. We have kind of moved that into auto mode, and so there’s an in auto you now can define number of columns, and you can define minimum column width, and if you define both, you get maximum number of columns that you defined, and the minimum width means that they’ll break and reflow. Or you can just wipe the minimum column width and you’ll just have the number of columns, and that means that they won’t reflow, which is the current manual mode, or you can just define minimum column width, and you can not define any columns. And then, okay, what happened? There? Zero columns? Uh huh. This might be a bug A bug is an error or unexpected result. Performance improvements, code optimization, and are considered enhancements, not defects. After feature freeze, only bugs are dealt with, with regressions (adverse changes from the previous version) being the highest priority., as I said, highly unstable. Let me make a note of that before I forget, columns should be resettable to the intent is that you can have, you know, just minimum column. It’s defined, and it will give you as many columns as fit on the on the window or in the container. Yeah. So that is still in progress, and that’s like the latest highly experimental thing. Other things that are coming. Is there a question? I see a hand, hi? Yes,
I have a quick question. Hi. I had noticed that all of the images you’re using are landscape images. Are they also all, all of them the same pixel resolution as well, pixel dimensions.
Ah, that’s a good question. They probably are, because at some point I just saved a bunch of pictures from my phone into my computer to use test images. But did were you wondering what this might look like with a different, reshaped image or vertical
right either in the middle, either introducing both landscape and portrait into the same grid? Yes.
So what happens there is, let’s say I replace one of these image. Replace, okay, replace. I do have There we go. That’s a vertical image. Yes. And so what happens is, this is sort of default grid behavior. The grid rows are going to assume whatever the size of the biggest element in them is. And so if you have one vertical image and a bunch of horizontal ones in in the same grid row, then the horizontal ones might look a bit odd, but what you can do is you can make that one take up two rows. Okay. Now these rows look huge. What is going on here? I think this might look better if that were, yeah, so you can kind of play with it. So if you wanted this to look really wanted the images to sort of line up really well, you’d probably be better off using a gallery block, because the images inside the gallery block can be sort of cropped to fit, and they always look all right. And the gallery block isn’t using grid yet, but that’s something that I hope will be able to change in a little while. So there’s actually, there’s, there’s an experimental PR that I haven’t worked on for a while. I had it up here on playground. That’s what a gallery block would look like if it were using grid. And I hope that this link still works. Okay, yeah, and so this would be a grid where each image actually occupies multiple columns and rows, so that we can sort of distribute them around in a way that doesn’t look too even. So they’re all sort of different sizes, and it looks pretty organic. And these images are a mix of vertical and horizontal. Say, for instance, this image here originally was horizontal, but the thing that the gallery does to the images inside it is you have, I think it might so that’s the gallery block, right? I can never find my way around when it’s just like, so there’s a setting crop images to fit. Yes, it was right here in front of you. So if you don’t crop images to fit in the gallery, they’ll just however, you know they’ll have whatever aspect ratio they usually have, but you can crop them to fit, and they’ll suddenly look very pretty. So, yeah, so in the case of having different images with different aspect ratios, that is probably what I’d recommend, although you can also try. I mean, I’m using images for the gridlock because I had to have some content for the demo. And this is what, you know, I like cat pictures, and so I’m going to use cat pictures, yeah. But yeah. And as I said, I mean, I’m not really a designer, so I’m sure there are loads more use cases, so more interesting and useful,
yeah? So Hans get asked if if it possible to retry this issue. Well, Hans, good. Which issue was that? Was it that overlapping issue that you so you can try to reproduce it?
Which? Oh, wait, which? Which issue was? Yeah. It, I
don’t know. I’m scared. Could you unmute yourself and try that again?
Yes, this issue you showed some time before, where you write on the issue on, yes, my English skirts are very bad.
Where was it the issue that, uh, well, that’s another one. That’s a known issue, actually. So interestingly enough, when the grid visualizer goes slightly off screen, this second horizontal scroll bar appears. I’m trying to figure out why, why that happens. Haven’t figured it out yet. Okay, so this kind of went off a bit when we added this portrait image, that the issue that I made a note of earlier was not being able to remove the number of columns from here, it just assumes that there’s always one column minimum, that that shouldn’t happen. We should be able to remove the number of columns and it will just act like, like auto mode currently acts, which is, let me see if I have Okay. It seems
as a issue that Burgett has written the chat I think,
oh, okay, so that’s a PR.
Where’s the chat? Yeah,
I just shared the PR link to your manual placement to set manual grid mode and our responsive behavior in both modes.
Oh, thank you. 62777, yeah, that’s actually okay. Yes, I should actually share the link to, where is it? Improvements to grid layout? Yes, this is the tracking issue. So there are a bunch of known bugs and known enhancements, well, things that we want to build. So what we have here in the list of things that we want to build for 6.7 is, apart from the positioning, being able to make both kinds of grid responses increase it fund a little bit on that. Okay, thank you. So, so what we have is, apart from the making responsive, which is this PR in progress that I showed to you, it’s a bit flaky. Never mind. It’ll be better before it’s an experiment, yeah. And what we also want to do is allow dragging blocks from outside the grid, which you currently can’t drag them into a specific position. And that’s that’s very annoying. We need to get that to work and also allow adding a new block to any position. So say you’re in here, you’ve got empty grid cells. You should be able to click on one of these grid cells, and an inserter would appear, and you’d be able to add any block in there and that. I think that’s probably the most important feature, if we think about it, because if you consider that, say, if you had a grid that was sort of like container block for a whole template, you could potentially build a whole template just by sort of clicking and dragging create the header The header of your site is typically the first thing people will experience. The masthead or header art located across the top of your page is part of the look and feel of your website. It can influence a visitor’s opinion about your content and you/ your organization’s brand. It may also look different on different screen sizes. and then create so that would actually be a really cool way of building templates. If it well, if we can get it, we will get it when we get it to work seamlessly, yeah. So that’s one of the things, yep. And then there’s some not quite sure how lists you should behave, because ListView gives you a list of blocks in markup order. Currently, if you drag and drop in the ListView, it changes the markup order. If the block has a position, it won’t change it visually, which is really weird. So we need to fix that, improve the design of the block movers when the grid is in manual mode. Yeah, that’s them. So having these block movers in manual mode, having basically four buttons, which is like, move up, move down, move left, move right. Maybe not great. Maybe it should be a sort of arrangement like you have on the keyboard, where you have left, right, top, bottom, one on top of the other, that sort of thing. By the way, if you’re wondering what this looks like with actual icons, I can show you. I always have button text labels enabled because I get really confused with the icons. They all look the same to me. But yeah, so basically, right now, this is four arrows each pointing in whatever direction. So it doesn’t look great. We probably need to improve that. Text labels going again, and what else do we have on the list?
Improving them? Movers bug causing double scrollbar. Yes, we know about that one. And then there’s a few code improvements to be done that won’t really affect the interaction. If you are yet. I’ll have to add that columns should be resell. I’ll just work on that on the PR. I don’t think it’s worth adding to this list because it’s, it’s sort of part of that PR that I’m working on right now, if you find anything else with with the stuff that’s already merged into trunk. So what’s in the plugin behind that experiment flag? If you find anything else that’s dodgy, or if you have any ideas for other functionality that might be useful here, please, please create an issue or add a comment to this tracking issue, either way, you know, like, just let us know about it
cool. So are there additional questions, or if that was too fast, do you want Isabel to kind of repeat some of that, I think we can ask her. So for that, I saw that you wanted to have one picture overlap the others. Is that also possible with a different block? So if I have a picture, well, I know there’s a group block or a cover block, where I can do particular layering. But is there a sensor to just put a paragraph on top of that image? Or,
yeah, I mean, you could say I have paragraph here, and I could potentially put this on top of an image, okay, yeah, or it could just partially overlap. If I had a big image, the paragraph might be like, if I have an image occupying these four grid cells, then maybe that paragraph, oh, I just resized the paragraph. See, this is not super
intuitive. Yeah, it’s hard to kind of aim for it,
and then I have to try and resize the image. And then, yeah, I guess I could move it down, or I could move it, yeah, right,
yeah. So gives a little bit more positioning, yeah? So I’m not sure what the I’m not sure what advantage would be, but it’s just kind of the idea to be able to do that minimal,
yeah, I mean, you do already have the cover block. I guess I think it might be more. So I did this little experiment with images, and I just had a bunch of PNGs with with the background cut out, and so I was just sort of playing around with them and and I put them inside the grid, so each of these is occupying multiple grid cells, and that’s how you can make them kind of overlap with each other. And I was testing this and seeing what it would look like if that so I could show you here, maybe it’s easier. So the top one is not responsive. The grid cells always stay in the same place in relation to one another. So you can make it go really small. It kind of it’s weird, because the rows don’t really change their height. I think one thing that might be interesting would be to have a control for the row height to like, to be able to to set a specific row height. But then, yeah, I keep working on this, I keep coming up against what I think is sort of the hard limits of not having customizable responsive behavior in the block editor, because you can do so much stuff, and it’s kind of like the bottom this bottom image here, I made that responsive. And so it’s kind of interesting, because it gets to a certain size, and things start piling on top of one another, and that works, but you don’t really have much control over it. And so if you do want that finer grained control, then we really, in the end, we’ll need to have some sort of of functionality whereby you can define, if not break points, define sort of sizes. I don’t know. I’m not quite sure what that might look like, but I think this, this is interesting work to do, because it’s really, you know, this is as far as you can go with grid, pretty much. And you can maybe tweak one or another thing, but you can’t get finer grain control than this.
Yeah, like that has this population on the picture. Yeah.
I have a question. Yes, Jessica, have you thought of implementing the fraction unit? So the FR unit for grid specifically, because now it’s only pixels rem and M,
we will. I don’t think I mean with we have column numbers for the controls. You mean we have column numbers and we have the minimum column width needs to have a number like, that’s in, that’s in sort of an absolute unit, yeah. So it does. So the grid itself, if we look at the rule, what we have here uses, so this is repeating five columns, and it uses a min, max of 011, fraction. And that’s because it’s not resizable, so that if the minimum size is zero, then it’ll always have five columns, whereas the other grid under it has a slightly different rule. This is a bit more I’m not sure if you can see that, try, like, make that bigger. So here, this rule has a repeat, but it’s auto fill. And it has this very, very sort of hacky looking computation in it, which goes, get the, you know, min max will be, sort of Max, 120 pixels, which is, I think, what I added in minimum column width. And then it’s, sort of, it grabs the number of columns that you define as the maximum number of columns, and it uses it to make sure that this never goes over whatever number of columns you defined here as a maximum, which I think here is five, but it can go under that number of columns if because it’s got A minimum width. So, yeah. So, so we do,
let’s say if I wanted a column to have a width of two fractions. So that’s currently not possible without writing x or CSS. No,
but I don’t think, okay. I mean, that would make sense if we had a way to define each column individually, is that what you’re getting at? Because, potentially, yes, yeah, okay, then you basically have to write out the whole rule, really. So if you’re saying, like, if you could customize grid template columns, like you can when you’re writing CSS, and you can just go, you know, one fraction, two fractions, 100 pixels, and you can have three columns with all different sizes. Ah, I yeah, I’m not sure that’s, I don’t think, well, that’s not something that you can sort of translate into UI. I don’t think that would always be down to writing rules at that sort of level of fine grainedness, because otherwise the fractions are sort of relative to each other, so they also behave a bit weirdly. But like so if you wanted, I don’t know, I think basically I don’t know I’d have to, I’d have to have, like, a specific like, this is the CSS I want to write, sort of thing, and try to figure out if, if we could, but I think at one point, it only makes sense to create UI for this up to a certain point. And if you’re what you’re trying to do is, I want this grid that’s very specific, and it has like a 16 REM column, and then the rest is sort of fractions, but they’re not all the same size, like one is one fraction, and the other is two and the other then at that point, I think you really have to write the CSS, because it would be really hard to translate that into controls. That the goal with the controls is that people who can’t write CSS can understand them and can work with like if the controls are basically write the CSS that you want in here, then at that point, maybe it doesn’t make sense. Maybe we should just write the CSS.
No, that’s totally okay. I think this is the this is the hard part of implementing such a feature, because you have to first think of like, as you said, the end users who have no idea how CSS works. And then also, I come with my question from a more advanced view as a developer, maybe from an enterprise project or such. So there’s always this big gap in between those worlds, and I think it’s kind of hard there to, like, decide, okay, what goes what’s possible, and what makes sense, and what should be kind of maybe an extension, or have Some, some possibility to extend existing features and, like, overwrite them with, I don’t know, somewhere in the editor, or even in theme JSON JSON, or JavaScript Object Notation, is a minimal, readable format for structuring data. It is used primarily to transmit data between a server and web application, as an alternative to XML., or somewhere else where it’s not accessible by the end user. Yeah,
and that makes a lot of sense, and particularly for Enterprise. Use cases. Now I’m thinking, for instance, with some of these controls, it might be a good idea to have a way to disable them. So if you’re building your enterprise website and you don’t want your users to be messing around with column spans or changing the type of grid, maybe you can hide those controls so only the theme developer has access to them, and not the end user. So that’s one thing. We’ve already done that for a couple of layout controls, and I think we might want to to do that for probably most of them, to give. To give. What website owners and theme creators for enterprise use cases are tools that they can use to basically disable all the foot guns that we have for less advanced users in the editor.
Yeah. Sounds good. You
Well, yeah, I like that. That function name kind of remove foot guns so people can shoot themselves in the foot. Yeah,
yeah. I think it’s, it’s good, like, I think in principle, there should be ways of, sort of gating especially advanced functionality, yeah. I mean having, having ways of building more custom grids, potentially, yeah, and that’s something that could also make sense for an enterprise. Yes, it’s also something to think about.
All right, yeah, so, um, thank you much for sharing. Do I have any other Do you want to show something else?
Uh, no, I’m good. I think I can stop sharing my screen now, if nobody has any more questions,
yeah, I’m scared. Jessica, do you have any more questions?
Maybe one more about another fairly specific developer question. Have you thought of adding possibilities for the justify and align properties that you have with grid so you can align those elements specifically.
Yes, that would actually be a good addition. I’m thinking, I don’t think there’s an issue for it. I’m pretty sure there isn’t, or I would have come across it by now. But yeah, I think that’s that’s definitely something that should be added.
I mean, because we have this controls already with the regular group block, but the row and, yeah, what’s it called stack?
Stack, block, row and stack, yeah, which are variations of Flex Layout? So, yeah, I think the same controls for grid would make sense. And I think we’ll, we’ll have to build them in sooner or later, hopefully sooner.
Excellent. Also, if
anyone is a developer and is interested in working on these things, because basically, up until now, it’s been myself and Rob. We’ve just been doing all
the work. I thought it would be actually, Lauren, I did not expect it’s only two of you working on this. So for that, yes, it’s pretty amazing work.
This is mainly why layout has been so slow to evolve. It’s like there’s not a lot of people working on it. And, I
mean, that’s what you don’t see usually. So I’m in other spheres. And of course, I have my own work to do, so I’m just partially always looking at things and seeing, like, is there progress or is there no progress? So these are information that’s often like falling, falling behind, and you just don’t notice until either someone tells you, or you’ll get to know what the actual situation is.
Yeah, yeah, true. I mean, it’s not super visible, unless you’re in GitHub GitHub is a website that offers online implementation of git repositories that can easily be shared, copied and modified by other developers. Public repositories are free to host, private repositories require a paid subscription. GitHub introduced the concept of the ‘pull request’ where code changes done in branches by contributors can be reviewed and discussed before being merged be the repository owner. https://github.com/ all day and seeing who’s working on what at night? No one. No one can do that. It’s a huge project. Yeah,
yeah, but this was really cool, so I’m glad that you kind of showed us what you’re working on and what’s an experiment, so we can start kind of testing it and getting our creative juices going in thinking, Well, I’m since the beginning, I actually wanted to do a Mondrian kind of layout for a website, and never really kind of worked through that. But this actually is there a way to change the size or the color of the gutters.
I mean, you can you can so you can use regular block spacing to change the size, but currently it only works for both. So you that’s actually something that I think is an open issue for it somewhere to have more fine grain control over. So. Being able to change the vertical gutter and the horizontal gutter separately, and not having it all change at once, because right now we only have, like, one block spacing, one value you put it in, and that’s it. Let’s control through the block spacing. What you can do in terms of changing the color is you can give the whole grid a background color, and then you can add whatever blocks inside with different colors, and then it will look as if the gutters have that color. Yeah, so,
all right, Hans GERD had another question in the chat, is it possible to set a hover? It’s not, has nothing to do with the grid, but is there a hover button, a hover control for the button
in theme JSON, to say, remember, be able to set that as an element to the button. Element,
yeah, in the elements, theme JSON, button, yeah, yeah, yeah. It should be, should be possible in hand skirt to set a hover color in through the theme JSON, similar to the link in link, you have it in the UI, but for the button, you don’t, but you could put it in the same JSON for that. Okay, all right. So this, if you’re all okay with it, I’m gonna give you six minutes back of this. Harvey hang I really thank you so much Isabel for taking the time out of your evening in Australia. And to show this off, we have have it recorded. So I will write a little post on the make blog (versus network, site) so other people can see it as well. And I hope you have already two testers here for the experimental Gutenberg stuff.
Yes, thank you.
And I will get through that too. So Well, we’ll see you all and the next hallway hangout. Remember, July 9 is about the block extensibility for the site editor and the post editor, they are merged now and tune in. All right. You all have a good evening, good afternoon and see you at the next time. Bye, thanks. See you. Bye.
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