Hey there!
Kirki developer here 🙂
a “merge” is unlikely.
Customize Posts will probably go in WP Core and Kirki won’t (though I’ve volunteered many times to create new control types for WP Core… If anyone listens, I’d still love to help).
However, once Customize Posts implements some things like this ticket https://github.com/xwp/wp-customize-posts/issues/1 we’ll be able to take advantage of its structure and allow creating new controls for post meta (with or without Kirki).
The future looks really exciting and promising…
@westonruter awesome work btw, really amazing!! If there’s any way I can help let me know.
Cheers! For Customize Posts, besides adding basic post authorship/editing in the Customizer (specifically for posts and pages), the goal I have for it is to provide the necessary plumbing to facilitate plugins to create controls that manipulate postdata/postmeta. So yeah, if there are any aspects in particular that would be helpful for Kikri or if it goes down a path that makes things more difficult, in either case please file issues in GitHub.
Also, content blocks are out of scope for this plugin. For Core, this is something that is more in the realm of the Shortcake plugin and its post elements. Shortcake does work (basically) with the editor in Customize Posts.
It looks like WordPress is considering implementing a fields API now, so this is one step closer to getting the Backend Fields standardised, e.g. input, text, colors, images, etc. and then allow developers to add custom controls. Then on top op that, the post editor is a nightmare for designing layouts. It was intended as a simple blog tool, it seems. When you need to create rows, column and drop in content widgets, WordPress has zero structure for building pages this way. I was looking forward that all these technologies could merge and what I had with Contao CMS in 2007 already would eventually make it into WordPress 8 years later, but no luck.
Contao CMS created pages as merely a container — without any actual content. You would select the type of page [root/regular/redirect], parent/child relationship, title, description (SEO) and author, permissions, theme template, status, start/stop visibility.
Then you added Article containers to areas (main/left/right) — which is similar to sidebars and widgets I guess.
Then you added Content Elements to each article in order. So you can build up rows, columns, and basically a widget grouping as columns/rows. Content elements were:
- Headline
- Text
- HTML
- List
- Table
- Code
- Content Slider
- Hyperlink
- Top Link
- Image (with auto-cached custom size cropping)
- Gallery
- Video/Audio
- SingleDownload
- Downloads
- Form
- Module (e.g. post list)
- Alias to Content Element
- Alias to Article
- Custom
So why not add widgets to pages in a parent child relationship like a nav menus. Then you can build rows, columns and widgets in a standard unified way. The default would be to simply add a standard text widget to the content area, but you should be able to build multiple widgets.
Oh Pipe Dream!
See also this Shortcake issue which discussed Content Blocks as an abstraction of widgets and shortcodes: https://github.com/wp-shortcake/shortcake/issues/585
Looks like “they” deleted my mockup screens, but I think something close to what Cornerstone is doing for their plugin should become a core feature as part of the customizer.
Here is my mockup idea in customizer:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/qiws64v2697drsx/Customizer%20Settings.png
I know this is marked resolved but I wanted to chime in here as well.
I originally came across this thread because I was looking for a live customizer row/column grid builder in which each column created is an active sidebar allowing for widgets. I did find some plugins that do this but all are managed from the back end and not very intuitive or elegant in my opinion.
It seems widgets are currently the most promising (and polished feature-wise) for content blocks. They can be inside/outside of the loop, they can be protected from filters such as autop, they already have access to the fields API, selective refresh, etc. Seems like it just makes sense. The first dev to write up a live front-end sidebar builder is going to really make waves in the WP world by finally truly being designer friendly without tons of nested shotcodes inside the The Content. The result could be a new wave of content block type widgets can be used for rapid web design all without poisoning the content editor which is still left in tact.
@pingram3541 Thanks for the feedback. I have some ideas for how we could go about adding dynamic widget areas inside of post content, with a Shortcake TinyMCE view to serve as a placeholder for the widgets that appear in the widget area, where clicking on one of the widgets listed in the area could then focus on the corresponding widget control in the Customizer pane. For a layout builder, we’d need to also provide a mechanism for creating a grid layout. At the most basic level, it could be just a TinyMCE plugin for creating tables.
@westonruter I’d love to work with you on that if you’re open to that. I’ve already had great success with another snippet you provided me regarding passing the queried object(s) to the customizer – so much we can now do, its very exciting!
This note widget was what sparked the idea. Love how it dynamically adds widget areas and inline editing of it’s own widget content.
@pingram3541 I’ve created a new repo and added you as a collaborator. I added a writeup of how I think it can be implemented: https://github.com/xwp/wp-customize-content-widgets
@westonruter perfect ty 🙂
@pingram3541 @westonruter Gentlemen, Hi. I’ve been keeping track of this thread for a couple of weeks now, what you are describing is almost exactly what I am looking for a developer to work with me on (I have some rough mockup sketches if you’d like to see a reference). Would either of you be willing to chat about this further with me, I have the funds to develop this and the client base to market it.
Let me know if you’re interested, my email address is sam(at)skizzar(dot)com
Eager to hear from you,
Sam
@skizzar Personally I’d only be interested in building something that would be part of an open community plugin (such as the Customize Content Widgets linked to above). Is that something you’d want to fund development of?
