Reply To: Block with multiple columns and blocks inside

• NickDA

• June 8, 2019 at 6:10 pm

In my case, because I create my own themes, and in it I have created my own shortcodes, I had to create the editor’s toolbar buttons myself to generate the shortcodes. In many cases various themes will do the same as will some shortcode plugins. It is coded in JavaScript, and the best documentation how to do that is from the TinyMCE documentation pages I guess, or look at the code of a theme or plugin that generates the code for the shortcode buttons.

Many of you however are jumping the gun… Gutenberg already has a columns block, and also a Group block, which basically can act as a container. Make sure you also activate the Gutenberg plugin in your site to get all the latest features. With the Gutenberg plugin activated, you can have variable width columns, and if your theme has “align” support you can make it act more like a section (full width and what not) more easily. Also, you can assign the vertical alignment of each column independently, something which I don’t think is possible even with WPBakery. Finally, by placing the columns block inside the Group block, you can easily add background color. By the time Elliot will add inner-blocks support, Gutenberg will probably have the option to also add background images and probably even background videos to the Group block. Gutenberg is getting better every week, unfortunately it should have been merged to the core at the end of this year, not last. I’m saying all this because if you don’t know what you are doing, and you need to learn and experiment, and by the time you are done, Gutenberg will probably have all the minimum features that any page builder needs to create layouts. If however, you are impatient like me, and have things in place, and thanks to ACF, building these things don’t take very long, go ahead and build your own containers and columns… pretty soon they will be alternative methods to the native Gutenberg blocks, at best.

I threw a lot of things at you, let me know if you want to see a short video demo about everything I said, how to create columns and containers with ACF (with what ACF allows us to so so far), and all the Gutenberg options, including manually adding some background images for the Group or Columns blocks – using Microthemer in this case is a breeze !