Exploring FSE and Pinegrow w/ Adam Lowe - Inside Link E19

Full Site Editing and custom blocks are a topic of conversation all over WordPress. This week, joining me live is Adam Lowe of Peak Performance Digital who has tons of first-hand experience with both custom blocks created with Pinegrow and using the FSE experience inside WordPress.
What is Pinegrow? What is Full Site Editing (FSE)? Join us to learn much more and see how it might benefit your workflow, or at the very least become more educated on what these tools allow you to do.
Connect with me: jonathanjernig...

[@AdamLoweIO]

To Kevin's question about section blocks with spacing, etc. Once you have enabled the controls in theme.json, you can use a regular group block and set the HTML element to in the advanced properties. IMHO, they didn't bury that deep enough because it's still findable if you poke around for an hour or two...

[@56k-web]

This was a very valuable stream. Thank you both! Adam played a huge role in my Pinegrow journey. I can't see the advantage of a custom FSE theme over the classic theme approach for my work. I prefer clients not to change any template relatet stuff so i love that it's hidden from them with a classic theme. the theme.json thing is also more in the way than helping my workflow. So... for now I will stay away from FSE.

[@Permaslug]

Glad you enjoyed it! I agree that FSE is likely not the best approach for me either, but custom blocks with Pinegrow almost certainly is

[@John.Rearden]

This PineGrow demo was a dumpster fire. Who in their right minds would ever wanna use it over modern pagebuilders is beyond me.

[@kylevandeusen]

Great stream, fellas!

[@marcio-duarte]

One thing that bothers me a little bit with custom blocks from Pinegrow is that it's using it's own custom helper functions to create blocks. This is a liability considering that WordPress is still changing it's APIs a lot. Right now my custom block created with it throws some warnings on the browser console, for example, depending on what it's doing. That's not a big of a deal, but it would be much better if they used only block.json and native functions/JSX to register and define everything about the block, which is what WordPress core recommends. Much more future-proof.

[@Permaslug]

I think it's one of the many tradeoffs when working with WordPress in general. Sure, you could code the blocks with no helper functions but would it make it harder/slower/more frustrating? Probably so. No different than those who choose to use a page builder vs a hand coded theme. There are drawbacks in every single case and you have to decide what makes sense for you

[@AdamSLowe]

And the broken block happened because I switched to an ACF block. If I wasn't trying to do a live demo I would have realized that I never reactivated the block plugin once I recreated it. Live demos drop my IQ by at least 30 points.

[@Permaslug]

Undah presshhhuuhhh!