Tag Archives: WordPress

Testing Ultimate Blocks on my WordPress site

The Writing Life of a Tadpole
June 4 2020

I’ve been testing all the big block collections, and it’s time for Ultimate Blocks. Not to be confused with Ultimate Addons, a different block collection.

Ultimate Blocks comes with 20 different blocks, let’s see if I want any of them in my personal collection:

  1. Button — It says “improved” but since I didn’t see the original, hard to say. It has four different sizes, flex/fixed/full width, colours or transparent, rounded or square, etc. What doesn’t work for me is that it is just one button…if you wanted to put several side-by-side (like a horizontal menu), you’d have to wrap it in some other kind of box/container.
  2. Call to Action — Title, text and a button, nothing unusual, but I do like the button is set up so that it overlaps the container (i.e. half-in, half-out). Not bad.
  3. Click to Tweet — I suppose if you were trying to get a campaign going, you could write a default tweet and then click the button to share.
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Testing Premium Blocks for Gutenberg in my WordPress site

The Writing Life of a Tadpole
June 4 2020

As you can see from about 10 of my last 20 posts, I’m on a run testing out various blocks on my Gutenberg site. The next “collection” to consider is called “premium blocks” and we’ll see if it lives up to the name. There are 12 blocks in the collection:

  1. Accordion — A really nice simple accordion block. I already have one with massive styling with Stackable, or highly workable with Kadence, but if I didn’t, this one would definitely get the job done. Easy to add items above each other, and then once created, to change typography, spacing, borders, padding, and even shadows. Nice.
  2. Banner — I have no use for it, but it is a block to put an image with a title and description over it, with some basic animation. There are six options, and depending on which you choose, the title and description pop up when you hover, or the description is added, or the title slides in, etc.
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The structural blocks I use in WordPress to organize a page or post

The Writing Life of a Tadpole
June 2 2020

All of the block collections ((default ones, JetPack, Advanced Gutenberg, Atomic Blocks, Kadence, Qodeblock, Stackable, and Ultimate Addons) come with multiple block options that let you better organize text on the page. There are lists, tables, columns, forms, tabs, accordions, and speciality tools. Let’s get started, as this is a big area.

Table Of Contents

Lists

For lists, the default block is called simply List. Not much you can do with it — it’s either bullets or numbers, and if it is numbers, all you can do is change the starting value. If it is bullets, you can’t even change the look or feel.

Advanced Gutenberg has its Advanced List. At first, I thought it was going to give me more control over numbered lists, but alas, no. It is about icons — 14 very basic ones, in fact.  » Read the rest

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The button block I use in WordPress

The Writing Life of a Tadpole
May 31 2020

All of the main block collections come with a “button” block (default blocks, Advanced Gutenberg, Atomic Blocks, Kadence, Qodeblock, Stackable, and Ultimate Addons). The purpose is simple — add some text, add a URL, add some styling, and when the user clicks on it, it goes to the link.

The default Buttons block is relatively simple, as most of them are…you can choose whether it opens in the same window or a new window, the size of the button (small, medium, large or extra-large), the button shape (square, rounded square or circular — more like ovals), button colour, and text colour, and of course the URL. Easier than using shortcodes as I used to have to do before Gutenberg. They work, they’re functional, but the real challenge is they only really work if you want one. Which is ironic since they name the block in the plural, but do not have any options to put several side-by-side, unless you wrap them in some sort of table or other type grid block.  » Read the rest

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I don’t want a group/container block in WordPress

The Writing Life of a Tadpole
May 18 2020

The default blocks in Gutenberg blocks includes a “group” block. Atomic Blocks, Qodeblock and Stackable added their own called “container”. The point of these “parent” blocks is to add a container around a bunch of nested blocks within it. Suppose, for example, you have four blocks that always go together — a header, a paragraph of text, an image, and some links. You could put those four inside a block, and then if you want to move them around a page, you just move the big container block, and all of those sub-blocks / child blocks will move at once. They stay together. Alternatively, where it becomes really useful is if you put the four child blocks in a reusable group block, say for example instructions on how to do something that you frequently refer to in your posts, and you can dump that block in anytime you need it.

While that can also start to make a site look repetitive in a blogging world, one area where it could be useful in my site is the close-out of a book review.  » Read the rest

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