General

Introduction

Blockstudio enables you to create custom WordPress blocks with nothing but PHP using the WordPress block.json format. It greatly simplifies the developer experience in regard to block registration, lazy loading assets, and custom fields.

Philosophy

Core focused

There is no secret sauce. Blockstudio is built on top of core WordPress features and Gutenberg components. It is designed to be a lightweight abstraction layer that helps you get started with custom blocks quickly.

Server side first

When creating dynamic blocks using nothing but WordPress, there is duplication of logic between PHP and JS code. There are discussions about solving this issue, including hydrating blocks on the client side (not good for SEO) or introducing a JSX parser for PHP (complex).

Blockstudio takes a different approach. You use PHP to write your block templates and sprinkle in interactivity like <RichText /> or <InnerBlocks /> using JSX-like tags. Inside the editor, those tags will be replaced with their React counterparts. On the frontend, the tags will be replaced with HTML content.

This way, you get the best of both worlds: a server-side rendered block with great interactivity in the editor.

File system based

While WordPress supports a file-based approach using the WPDefinedPath string type, it is also possible to link assets or templates from other destinations. Blockstudio doubles down on the file-system as the primary (and only) way of registering blocks. This decision was not made to restrict, but to set a block structure in place that can't be argued with. For example, if a style.css or script.js file is found in the same folder as a block.json, then you can be sure that it belongs to this exact block only.

No setup

Blockstudio just works. It is designed to remove friction when composing custom blocks and doesn't come in your way while doing so. Want to use Twig for your template? Simply rename the file extension. Need to include some CSS? Create a style.css file. Blockstudio will automatically enqueue it whenever the block is being used on your page, even when it is used outside the post_content with the rendering function.

Do you have feature requests or questions? Message us.