How to Create Custom WordPress Editor Blocks in 2020

Peter Tasker on creating blocks right now:

It’s fairly straightforward these days to get set up with the WP CLI ‘scaffold’ command. This command will set up a WordPress theme or plugin with a ‘blocks’ folder that contains the PHP and base CSS and JavaScript required to create a custom block. The only drawback that I noticed is that the JavaScript uses the old ES5 syntax rather than modern ESNext. Modern JavaScript allows us to write more concise code and use JSX in our custom block code.

You can also use the ‘create-guten-block’ tool by Ahmad Awais. It gives you a lot of the boilerplate stuff you need out of the box, like Webpack, ESNext support etc. Setting it up is fairly straightforward, and it’s similar to Create React App.

I’ve used create-guten-block for the handful of custom blocks I’ve made so far, and have found it a pretty nice experience.

But… I feel like I just sort of lucked into being comfortable with all this. I have one foot in WordPress development and just so happen to have one foot in React development. Building blocks with both technologies together feels decently natural to me. If blocks were Angular or something, I feel like I might not have even given it a shot.

I’ll echo this sentiment:

I also found it really annoying working on a block that’s actively changing in code. Every time you reload Gutenberg, you’ll get the “This block appears to have been modified externally…” message because the markup of the block has changed.

I get why it’s throwing the error, but it slows you down.

At the end, Peter mentions the approach of building blocks that Advanced Custom Fields has. It almost feels like a weird bizarro-reverso world. The ACF approach seems more like what WordPress would have done in a normal world (building blocks with just PHP and templating) and third-parties would be the ones adding all the fancy React stuff.

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