From Classic to Blocks in 90 Days?

Who is this session for?

Campus Web managers, marketing teams, multisite users, content managers, plugin developers

Session description

We support campus multisite webs across the state of Maine. As we explored core Gutenberg blocks, stock patterns, block suite(s), and design libraries -- we found it overwhelming to present so many options for creating content to our (hundreds of) editors across the various campuses we support. Some blocks had usability or accessibility concerns; some were redundant; some offered a smoother conversion to blocks than others; some designs utilized blocks we did not want to support. And, each block or pattern often defaults to the canvas with settings galore that often don’t match a campus brand’s styles.

To ease these concerns, we developed 2 plugins. A "Block Manager" allows us to expose only the blocks we choose to support. The campus team can add a list of sites which may have additional blocks available. A "Block Patterns Manager" enables us to hide stock patterns and add custom patterns into categories for a given campus Multisite installation.

We'll walk you through our situation, websites, and the process we used to select the blocks we chose. We will demo the 2 plugins and show how they work and serve campus-specific needs across the state. We will walk through how we engage each campus marketing team to work through this massive shift and how they might best utilize these tools to their advantage. Lastly, we can cover next steps and challenges we have with these young, custom plugins we created.