The No-Code way to Create Native Gutenberg Blocks with Pinegrow

[@techakayy]

Another excellent video course Adam. Thanks bunch!

[@joxmanyou]

You're back! Glad to hear it.

[@kylevandeusen]

An absolutely fantastic tutorial, Adam! This is your best one yet! 🙌

[@AdamLoweIO]

Thanks, man!

[@vcodev108]

I was mising pinegrow video from you since the pinegrow wp plugin was released, I was just thinking why everyone became so silent after its launch, and now Im happy to see you again with such awesome video please make more pinegrow tutorial. thank you!

[@AdamLoweIO]

Thanks! Life hit me pretty hard in mid-December and I'm only now recovering from it all. I'm actually getting ready to launch a mini-course on building a custom Pinegrow theme by the end of this month. Once that's in the can, I should have the bandwidth to start making regular videos again. adamlowe.io/mini-course-no-code-wp-theme/

[@Sharpete]

Excellent video, thank you. As a new user of PineGrow, I have signed up on the wait list for your course. Looking forward to it.

[@pepitogrande]

Missed your videos. And Pinegrow videos in general, I guess. It's a shame that no one is talking about it. There was a reasonably big "hype" before and short after the WP plugin launch, but now it's a dead silence :(

[@AdamLoweIO]

I agree that it's a shame it's not getting any attention. I think that's because it's in an awkward "in-between" position where it's too advanced for a lot of WP Designers, but not quite nerdy enough for hard core developers. I was hoping that it could get some traction similar to Oxygen and Bricks, since it's not much more complicated than either of them, but the FB influencers decided to go all out on team Bricks. And aside from Pinegrow themselves, I'm one of the only people who make/made Pinegrow videos regularly. Life caught me off guard for the last few months so I had to take a breath, but I'm back now!

[@kareem2928]

Nice intro "love them or hate them blocks are the future of WordPress" ^__^, Well done Adam! Damn, this is a really good one. I watched it twice, I've delayed more than once to dig deep into Pinegrow since it requires a learning curve and needs time, but after ur video, I'll do it ASAP. Some questions, - Is there a way to pick a framework, not Tailwind, like ACSS/Oxyprops? or create your own? - The CPT part is interesting. Why you didn't pick a plugin like ACF or MB? Just to show this ability in Pinegrow? Does it support fields too? - In case I've created a block plugin, does it require to be updated for WP core like what we get in WP repository. - Can I create my own complete theme and sell it? If yes, Any tips or info, Appreciated. Quote "Bricks: nowhere near ready for the types of projects that I work on or support" May I ask what type of projects it cannot do with Bricks? Can you mention downsides, etc? - As I understood, Your agency now relies on Pinegrow for Complex sites and might entirely? Yes? No page builders at all after Oxygen/BD case and the other issues you mentioned. - You are an expert with it for sure, How long it takes you to build a complex site with Pinegrow? - Question, Couple of days ago wanted to do a block with Gutenberg, the block should use a shortcode to execute on each post if needed depending on the plugin used. e.g. [shortcode custom="data from WP editor"] I wanted to use data from the block editor, but the shortcode will be dynamic in case I used another plugin for this purpose. The data will be there just with a different shortcode. Any help appreciate. - Question, Comments in WP is not properly accessible, I've seen some sites look like they created their own by using blocks might! > check studiopress-Showcase. Anything regarding WP comments? Kind Regards Kareem

[@AdamLoweIO]

Kareem, thanks for the kind words! To answer your questions: - ACSS and Oxyprops work in Pinegrow without any effort. If you are using the desktop app, just drop a reference to the CSS or Sass files in place, and you are ready to rock. You can also use the "Open in Wrapper" feature so you can see how any installed themes or plugins will look on your site while you are inside the Pinegrow builder. (pinegrow.com/release_notes/pinegrow-7-november-28-2022/#open-in-wrapper) - Custom post types and taxonomies are built-in WordPress functions and are simple enough that I never felt the need to use plugins like CPTUI to add them. Any of the online WP Code generator websites will spit out perfectly good functions for you, or you can just use Pinegrow's actions. Even when I use Metabox, with its built-in CPT/Taxonomy UI, I still stick the function into my theme's code. It's one less thing for end users to "discover" and futz around with. As for custom fields, WordPress doesn't have nice clean functions to add them for some unknown reason, so Pinegrow chose not to create a smart action for them. I was actually just ribbing Matjaz about that earlier today ;) - When creating a block plugin, there shouldn't need to be a reason to update it for WP Core unless something significant gets changed or deprecated by WordPress. Since that almost never happens, it's pretty safe to say that any block plugins you create today can safely run without modification for several years. - Yes, you can create and sell a complete them using Pinegrow. In fact, I'm working on a mini course right now to walk through the process. (adamlowe.io/mini-course-no-code-wp-theme/) I expect to open it up late next week or early the week of 3/27/23. About my "Bricks is not ready for primetime" comment: There are two, maybe three things that concern me. First, it is still relatively immature and is frequently released with breaking bugs. Look at the hubbub from today about 1.7 deleting people's stylesheets. Second, and this is also an issue I've had with Oxygen, is that sites created with theme/page builders hit the database much harder than php themes. It's not noticeable on the average site, but on high-traffic sites with dynamic data, it's the difference between living comfortably on a 2-CPU server vs. a 4-CPU server. Lastly, I'm pretty sure I remember Tom recently saying (I don't have a reference) that Bricks probably isn't ready for production yet. I'm sure he was talking about more mission-critical projects than your average small business website, but I still think waiting for v2.x makes sense. As for how long it takes to create a site with Pinegrow, that's a tough question to answer since the definition of "complex" is so vague. What I can tell you is that it takes me about the same amount of time in Pinegrow as it does with Oxygen or with Bricks, and slightly less time than it takes with GeneratePress and GenerateBlocks. It's faster than GP/GB because I have a library of pre-made components now that I just drop straight in as HTML/CSS and can reuse them across projects. And when I don't have a component, I can easily find one online. I also find that working with GP/GB and Kadence is slightly slower because styling isn't class-based. I'm not entirely sure what you are asking about the block shortcodes. Are you trying to run a different shortcode depending on certain conditions? If so, you can do something like wrapping 'echo do_shortcode( '[myshortcodehere]');' inside a conditional. If you are trying to access block data, things get a bit uglier. Bill Erickson has a good article that might be helpful (www.billerickson.net/access-gutenberg-block-data/) Regarding WP Comments: They are pretty much a pile of steaming garbage for a lot of reasons, and I honestly don't use them very often at all. Pinegrow includes WP Actions for the usual comments functions like comments_template(), comments_form(), wp_list_comments(), get_next_comments_link(), etc., and they include some comments conditionals, but I don't see anything that would let us build our own comments section. I saw some recent Facebook discussions about 3rd party comment systems that looked interesting. Maybe that's something to explore? I hope this all helps!

[@kareem2928]

@@AdamLoweIO Thank you very much, for your time and your reply, and for all. I'll dig deep into this.

[@DesignRobPearce]

@@kareem2928 Been using Bricks since release and half the issues people have reported I've never had. I've moved from Oxygen and not missed anything yet that Oxygen had, and all my clients sites both big and small I've easily been able to move over to Bricks with 0 issues.