As the WordPress Block Editor ecosystem grows and evolves, we expect to see creative ideas and capabilities being offered that will help people utilize and leverage the maturing capabilities of the Gutenberg project. One such area is how to enable a wider set of users to build their own blocks. Because developing blocks requires using a different language, frameworks, and tools, there have been several initiatives introduced like ACF Blocks to address this need.
Justin Tadlock just did a review on WordPress Tavern of one of the latest offerings, Genesis Custom Blocks. This plugin was launched by the Studio Press team from WPengine back in September. There is both a free and commercial version available.
Genesis Custom Blocks is currently a lightweight field manager for custom blocks. It provides an admin interface for creating, editing, and managing those blocks. Developers use this interface to essentially create block options in which a user can configure via the editor.
The free version of the plugin includes 13 standard form fields, such as text, image, URL, color, and more. The commercial version includes an additional six field types and allows users to import or export their custom blocks.
Justin Tadlock on WordPress Tavern
This is an interesting capability. We recommend a full read of Justin’s article to understand the pro and cons. Like many of the offerings coming from WPengine, it seems geared to pulling you into their environment. If you are a WPengine client, probably worth considering. We will be doing our own evaluation over the next couple of weeks and share our findings here.