Blocks Plugin

Provides a "block based" content management experience in Winter CMS

NOTE: This plugin is still in development and is likely to undergo changes. Do not use in production environments without using a version constraint in your composer.json file and carefully monitoring for breaking changes.

NOTE: This plugin requires Winter CMS v1.2.2+ (currently unreleased, so target the dev-develop branch instead).

Installation

This plugin is available for installation via Composer.

composer require winter/wn-blocks-plugin

In order to have the actions support function correctly, you need to load /plugins/winter/blocks/assets/dist/js/blocks.js after the Snowboard framework has been loaded.

Core Concepts

Blocks

This plugin manages the concept of "blocks" in Winter CMS. Blocks are self contained pieces of structured content that can be managed and rendered in a variety of ways.

Blocks can be provided by both plugins and themes and can be overridden by themes.

Actions

This plugin also introduces the concepts of "actions"; a way to define and execute client side actions that can be triggered by various events. Currently, actions are only defined in the $/winter/blocks/meta/actions.yaml file and must exist as a function on the window.actions object in the frontend keyed by the action's identifier that receives the data object as the first argument and (optionally) the event object that triggered the action as the second argument.

NOTE: This is very much a WIP API and is subject to change. Feedback very much welcome here for ideas around how to register, manage, extend, and provide actions to the frontend.

Registering Blocks

Themes can have their blocks automatically registered by placing .block files in the /blocks folder and subfolders.

Plugins can register blocks by providing a registerBlocks() method in their Plugin.php file. The method should return an array of block definitions in the following format:

public function registerBlocks(): array
{
    return [
        'example' => '$/myauthor/myplugin/blocks/example.block',
    ],
}

Block Definition

Blocks are defined as .block files that consist of 1 to 3 parts:

A YAML configuration section that defines the block's name, description, and other metadata as well as the block's properties and the form used to edit those properties
A PHP code section that allows for basic code to be executed when the block is rendered, similar to a partial
A Twig template section that defines the HTML markup template of the block

When there are two parts, they are the Settings & Markup sections. When there is just one part it is the Markup section.

The following property values (name, description, etc) can be defined in the Settings section of the .block files:

name: Example
description: Example Block Description
icon: icon-name
ignoreContext: [] # List of contexts to never include the block in
allowContext: [] # List of contexts to only include the block in
permissions: [] # List of permissions required to interact with the block
fields: # The form fields used to configure the block

Blocks can use components in them, although they may face lifecycle limitations with complex AJAX handlers similar to component support in partials.

Using the `blocks` FormWidget

In order to provide an interface for managing block-based content, this plugin provides the blocks FormWidget. This widget can be used in the backend as a form field to manage blocks.

The blocks FormWidget supports two additional properties:

allow: An array of block types that are allowed to be added to the widget. If specified, only those block types listed will be available to add to the current instance of the field.
ignore: A list of block types that are not allowed to be added to the widget. If specified, all block types will be available to add to the current instance of the field, except those listed.

Those properties allow you to limit the block types that can be added to a specific instance of the widget, which can be very helpful when building "container" type blocks that need to avoid including themselves or only support a specific set of blocks as "children".

Examples

The button_group block type only allows button blocks to be added to it:

buttons:
    label: Buttons
    span: full
    type: blocks
    allow:
        - button

The columns_two block type allows every block except for itself to be added to it:

left:
    label: Left Column
    span: left
    type: blocks
    ignore:
        - columns_two
right:
    label: Right Column
    span: right
    type: blocks
    ignore:
        - columns_two

Integration with the Winter.Pages plugin:

Include the following line in your layout file to include the blocks FormWidget on a Winter.Pages page:

{variable type="blocks" name="blocks" blockContext="pages" tab="winter.pages::lang.editor.content"}{/variable}

Rendering Blocks

For now, blocks need to be rendered through the use of a special blocks.htm partial that must exist in your theme:

{% for blockIndex, block in blocks %}
    {# Adding blocks to the following array allows them to implement their own containers #}
    {% if block._group in ["hero", "section"] %}
        {% partial block._group ~ ".block" data=block blockIndex=blockIndex %}
    {% else %}
        <section class="flex flex-wrap items-center mx-auto max-w-screen-xl">
            <div class="w-full p-4">
                {% partial block._group ~ ".block" data=block blockIndex=blockIndex %}
            </div>
        </section>
    {% endif %}
{% endfor %}

You can then use the following Twig snippet to render the block data in your layout:

{% partial 'blocks' blocks=blocks %}

Desired Rendering API

The following is an example of the desired API for rendering blocks:

{% blocks blocks=this.theme.footer_blocks %}

Other ideas and suggestions are welcome.

Integrating with TailwindCSS / CSS Purging

If your theme uses CSS class purging (i.e. Tailwind), it can be useful to add the following paths to your build configuration to include the styles for any blocks defined by the theme or plugins.

// tailwind.config.js
module.exports = {
    content: [
        // Winter.Pages static page content
        './content/**/*.htm',           
        './layouts/**/*.htm',
        './pages/**/*.htm',
        './partials/**/*.htm',
        './blocks/**/*.block',
        
        // Blocks provided by plugins
        '../../plugins/*/*/blocks/*.block',
    ],
};

Feedback

The Winter.Blocks is perfect for my block-based themes. I've been looking for something like this for a long time

xitara/wn-blocks-plugin