Started doing some QA of the Polished Portfolios testing call to get a better feel for what working with page templates will feel like under Full-site editing.
Setting up the environment
According to the above call, the main things that need to be done to get testing are:
- Install WordPress
- Install the tt1-blocks theme
- Install the latest version of Gutenberg (v10.7.1 as of now)
I was able to do this quickly within Local by creating a site, opening the Site Shell and running:
wp plugin install gutenberg --activate
wp theme install tt1-blocks --activate
In addition to the code, the testing call recommends importing some demo content from here.
Since the above link is a WordPress xml export, we can use curl to follow the redirect and download the xml for importing into WordPress. For this specific testing call, that command looks like:
wp plugin install wordpress-importer --activate
curl -L https://cloudup.com/files/iEsfmmRZeCg/download > callfortesting.xml
wp import callfortesting.xml --authors=create
Testing the feature
My goal was to create a landing page that has a featured section with the latest post of the portfolio category as well as a secondary section that has two posts and finally one last section to show everything else.
Here’s a recording of my session along with some notes for things I encountered:
https://i.getf.ly/xQu7g0mg
- 4:30 – The spacing looked off to me, but then I realized that the heading was the same color as the background so I wasn’t seeing the heading text. Investigating (in the video) and it looks like a specificity issue at the ~6:40 mark. The anchor link within the post heading doesn’t inherit the text color.
- 14:10 – I tried to adjust the pagination of posts to 10 and the block crashed. I was doing it via keyboard, but the mouse click to increase the number appears to work.
- 16:30 – Some general usability feedback of the column block: I’d love a way to make the vertical margins disappear so that full-width sections that have background colors don’t show any space between them. I was able to hack together a workaround with a custom utility class (see video), but it would be nice to have the ability to control that sort of design pattern within the column block.
- 27:00 – General UX – It appears that I didn’t save the template since it’s showing a 404, even though the title says “portfolio.” I think what confused me was the “Publish” button in the upper right corner. Coming from a WP background I think I understand that “Publish” meant to publish the page template I was editing, but on initial use, I was hesitant to push the button because my context was the original page that I had created, not the page template I was editing. Maybe there’s a way to make that button more explicit. So something along the lines of “Save Page Template.”
- 30:00 – Haha. I broke things. 😀 I tried to move a query to within a column block and hosed this template. Ahh well. It’s time to wrap this up and post my findings!