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The Block Editor project for WordPress and beyond. Plugin is available from the official repository.
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Grid Layout Improvements for 6.7 #57478

Open tellthemachines opened 8 months ago

tellthemachines commented 8 months ago

Part of Design Tools overview and Layout improvements.

The Grid layout type shipped in WP 6.3 and in WP 6.6 a new Grid variation for the Group block was stabilised, along with support for grid children spanning multiple columns and rows, and on-canvas resize handles.

What's this currently look like?

Under Gutenberg > Experiements, enable "Grid interactivity".

When a Grid block is set to Manual mode (in the block sidebar under Layout), it's now possible to drag and drop blocks into specific grid cells, as well as moving them up, down, left and right with the movers:

https://github.com/WordPress/gutenberg/assets/8096000/afe0fee0-375d-499e-8513-115a0192f843

Tasks

Needed before we remove experimental flag

Needed for 6.7

Nice to have

SaxonF commented 8 months ago

Quick sketch showing what a next iteration of grid might look like. Keeping in mind we still want to push layout forward in general including generic width/height options via https://github.com/WordPress/gutenberg/pull/53455.

image

Children fill width/height of column/row by default. I'm showing width/height controls just to illustrate they are different to span and can be included in the separate layout work. We can start with inspector controls and work our way towards on canvas manipulation, including start/end of grid items which can lead to overlapping blocks.

paaljoachim commented 7 months ago

Some free flowing thoughts.... Can we have one grid system that can be used by the Cover block, Group block. Columns block etc? (with some minor adjustments where needed.)

I say this as the "Change Content Position" inside the Cover block can use a nice upgrade. Having one grid system used between the various blocks would be very helpful.

In relation to grid. It would also be helpful to have an icon to turn on/off helper lines. Somewhat like InDesign/Photoshop one can turn on the grid lines to see how things line up.

tellthemachines commented 7 months ago

Thinking through what's needed here in light of #58539:

it would be interesting to experiment with making the grid configuration match theme content and wide width settings

I played around with this a bit and it doesn’t seem possible to match the current behaviour of content and wide layouts with grid. In any case there’s no real gain in replacing the content sizing and alignment logic with a grid-based implementation.

noisysocks commented 7 months ago
  • Positioning grid items with drag and drop: the drop indicators when dragging over a grid block could show a block dropzone over empty columns.
  • Changing column and row span of grid items with drag to resize

👋 I'm going to try and build a prototype of this stuff.

noisysocks commented 6 months ago

@tellthemachines, @SaxonF and I are actively working on this. I updated the issue to be an overview issue and added a few tasks that we've discussed.

https://github.com/WordPress/gutenberg/pull/59052 added a new Grid interactivity experiment which you can enable in Gutenberg → Experiments. Currently you can visualise where the grid cells are when you select a Grid block and use a resize handle to set the span of a block within the Grid. I'm looking into drag and drop now.

noisysocks commented 4 months ago

Update:

A lot of this feature has involved synchronous back-and-forth chat so in an effort to make those conversations more transparent I've create a channel in the w.org slack called #feature-grid.

I've been experimenting lots with drag and drop in https://github.com/WordPress/gutenberg/pull/59490 and in https://github.com/WordPress/gutenberg/pull/61025. There's some good progress but still a lot of discovery to do and questions to answer.

@tellthemachines and I both have a few commitments coming up, and @SaxonF is now on parental leave, so we're running out of time to get things polished for WP 6.6.

With that in mind @tellthemachines and I are going to focus on shipping:

Tasks to do:

andrewserong commented 3 months ago

Nice progress on this @tellthemachines and @noisysocks!

I'm not sure if it's related to #60986 or the site editor resize bug, but while testing in trunk in the post editor, I noticed that the boundaries for the resizeable box aren't always reliable. In the below Grid, the last item in particular displayed a bit of weirdness in its width while dragging. Also, sometimes when dragging an item to the right, the box seems to be getting limited horizontally. Here's a screengrab:

https://github.com/WordPress/gutenberg/assets/14988353/17cfe54f-68b1-4f32-a260-4c5785d75a51

Grid markup ```html

A paragraph

Another paragraph

Another one

A paragraph

Yet another

```

Let me know if you'd prefer I open an issue, and I can put one up tomorrow.

tellthemachines commented 3 months ago

@andrewserong I can't reproduce that in the post editor, only in the site editor, so it seems like it's the site editor bug (I'm not sure where it was reported, maybe in one of the PRs? but pretty sure that's the bug). Were you able to reproduce it in the post editor too? I haven't managed to do so on the latest trunk.

Edit: even in the site editor, the behaviour changes depending on whether the block was newly-added, or if the page has been reloaded after adding the block (it's still buggy after reload, just not as buggy)

andrewserong commented 3 months ago

Were you able to reproduce it in the post editor too? I haven't managed to do so on the latest trunk.

Yes, I can reproduce in the post editor, but only when it's iframed. I.e. if I set Custom Fields to be visible it's fine, but not if they're not. I also ran into an issue where after interacting with the resizer for a while the post editor freezes (this is while not iframed):

image

Specifically the freezing appears to happen when I go to resize the last block and drop it back to very near the edge of the block:

https://github.com/WordPress/gutenberg/assets/14988353/a6018c25-7721-4097-8c7a-58c5c4067f49

Could there be an infinite loop or memory leak somewhere?

I've opened up a separate issue over in #61633 in case that helps keep the conversation contained 🙂

andrewserong commented 3 months ago

Quick update for anyone following along this tracking issue: with the outstanding interactivity issues now addressed, the grid visualiser and resizers have been stabilised for Gutenberg 18.4, which means folks will be able to try out dragging Grid child blocks to set column and row span, without having to activate the interactivity experiment in the plugin. There are still some pending visual enhancements to explore, but I believe it looks like the feature should now be in the overall shape that it’s intended to be for WP 6.6.

tellthemachines commented 1 month ago

Update on grid work

In the past few weeks, most of the functionality intended to ship in 6.7 has been put in place behind the "grid interactivity" experiment flag:

Next steps

Testing of these new features is highly appreciated!

There are a few small bugs and enhancements outstanding (see list in issue description), and once they are fixed, the new Manual grid should be in a good place to stabilize in the plugin.

There's also the alignments feature which would be nice to have in 6.7, but needs some design work first: https://github.com/WordPress/gutenberg/issues/62895

noisysocks commented 1 month ago

Did a bit of housekeeping here 🧹

I've:

My hope is that it's now much clearer how other contributors can help with development. @tellthemachines is away until October, so any help is much appreciated 🙂

noisysocks commented 1 week ago

Very unlikely this will make it into 6.7 – I've punted it in the project board.