Patterns

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  • Composing with patterns

    It’s no secret that I’m a fan of WordPress patterns.

    The ability to design a part of a site with a bunch of blocks and have it persist—whether synced or not—across my site, or shared across most others, is quite a powerful idea.

    While they’re great, I feel there’s more potential to unlock with patterns, especially if we consider them as sections to compose pages with, not just groups of blocks.

    Think of a site’s hierarchy: A site is made up of pages, which are composed of patterns, which consist of blocks—essentially, data objects. If patterns and blocks represent differing levels of hierarchy, why are they currently treated the same in the WordPress editing experience?

    So let’s explore.

    One idea is to treat patterns as a higher-order experience, where invoking a site’s pattern library zooms out the canvas to provide a bird’s-eye view, enabling you to compose with patterns, like this:

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  • The pattern block

    I’ve long been a huge fan of block patterns. So much that I see patterns becoming the primary method most of us lay out pages within the block editor. And with the recent release of Gutenberg, and upcoming release of WordPress 5.9, patterns are getting a lot of attention. There are a number of Pattern API improvements on the way, but one I am most interested in, is the addition of the Pattern block.

    rich.blog

  • How to build WordPress patterns

    If you’re a theme or plugin developer in the page building ecosystem, now is a better time than ever to start capitalizing on arguably the most exciting addition to Gutenberg, since Gutenberg: patterns.

    Let’s dive in and discover how to leverage the new Patterns API and build beautiful patterns.

    rich.blog

    ImageImageImage 11 replies