Learn How to Build Templates, Archives and Views with Blocks

   Amir

How to

December 23, 2019
31

Heard about the new Toolset Blocks but not sure how to get started? You can learn by following four detailed videos, each teaching one subject.

Designing Templates with Blocks

For the step-by-step description, read about designing templates in Toolset’s Getting Started documentation.

Designing Archives with Blocks

Follow the steps in customizing archives.

Creating Views (lists of content)

Read the full description of how to create Views.

Designing the Site’s Homepage

Last, but definitely not least, you should know that Toolset now allows you to build every page on your site and not only the “dynamic content”. With Toolset Blocks, there’s no need to mix two sets of workflows on the same site. If a site already uses Toolset, you can use it for every page.

Feedback? Questions? Suggestions?

We hope that you’re enjoying Toolset Blocks and are already using it to build beautiful dynamic websites. Please leave comments with your questions, ideas and suggestions and we’ll get back to you.

 

Comments 31 Responses

  1. Is there a step 0 (zero) video that shows where to start integrating blocks with an existing Toolset site? I’ve been working with Toolset for over 5 years and have no experience with the WordPress Block Editor at all. These Toolset Blocks tutorial videos look quite intriguing, but I don’t know how to integrate Blocks with my existing Toolset custom pages & Types. Primarily – to begin with – how do I create new pages using blocks, but leave my existing pages using Views and Content Templates alone?

    For instance, my membership site for consultants has been complete for a few years or more. Every few months I add a new feature using custom Types, Views, and CTs. Now, I would like to build the next feature using Toolset Blocks. How do I make a new page to build with that, but leave my existing pages still based on the WP Classic Editor?

    Thanks,
    Jeff
    —————-

  3. Hi,
    I tell you in a constructive way so that you take it into account for future versions and future examples, the pages created are very simple, very uninteresting, without any effects, without special separations between sections, without shadows, without overlapping images with colors, no borders, no angles at the edges, very basic designs. It’s how web pages were designed in the past. Of course, they are so simple that I guess they will load very quickly. It also gives me the impression that it is a lot of work to make such simple pages. They are the usual wordpress pages. And of course, footers and headers cannot be designed, it depends on the theme used and generally the themes have very few possibilities.
    You also need examples of shop page design for woocommerce, for products, for the cart, my account, …
    Also missing are examples of how to copy templates, blocks, block styles or fragments of templates between pages, posts, etc.
    Regards,
    Fran

    • Makes sense. We will offer more tutorials that focus on design. For this set of tutorials, we wanted to explain the usage, while only briefly showing design features.

      In the near future, we’ll also have tutorials on WooCommerce, Maps and more.

    • I think if you explore a bit more you will find that there is quite a bit of configuration in the toolset block (not as much, admittedly, as what you get with some page builders). For the videos Dario has to keep the flow simple for the purpose of demonstration.

      I have been experimenting on one of the reference sites in a sandbox. the Gym sample, and was able to take the design a bit further and make it a bit more refined. I suspect that things will improve further in the future. Currently some of the clunkiness of navigating block layouts is evident, especially when you get into a bit of nesting of elements. That’s not a Toolset issue, it’s just the where we are with Gutenberg to date. That being said, it has come a long way in the last year. One big bonus is asynchronous saving on posts. I have noticed it is a massive time saver on builds.

      Amir, one thing I notice, in repeating images/gallery as in the Downtown Fitness Centre post, is, when you load it from an uncached state, they one image loads very large and then the galley of 3 in row renders properly. This isn’t very appealing.

  4. Don’t forget to tell people about the demo sites and how you can set them up as a sandbox for training and exploring how things work.

  5. i was expecting a clean url for the block editor version. it seems its not going away. this is one thing that make me think twice to move my existing 5 sites to toolset.

    url such as this is not nice. we have to agree and so something about it :

    https://gyms-and-trainers.discover-wp.com/find-the-best-gym/?wpv_view_count=6006-TCPID209&wpv_post_search=&wpv-gym-type=0&wpv-wpcf-rating=&wpv_filter_submit=Submit

    it should be something like this .

    https://gyms-and-trainers.discover-wp.com/find-the-best-gym/post_search=gym-type=rating

    all this wpv, wpcf, TCPID should be hidden from url

    Good Luck .

    • The URL that you gave as an example is from a View that has a search. Those arguments in the URL are the search inputs. The URL of a search page needs to have the arguments for the filter in order to pass to the server what visitors are searching for. Views that have no search will have simpler looking URLs.

  6. It is not clear what is Group Element, what is it used for and how is it difer from a Container.
    Do you have an example?
    Anyway it is a great post!

    • Dario was showing how to “group elements” using the Toolset Container block. He added a Container block to the design and then dragged other elements into it. A Container has many styling features, so we wanted to show it in action.

    • Of course, having something work and then not work is very disturbing. You probably realize that we are making big efforts to maintain existing compatibility. However, Divi code is not within our control.

      In order to give you the best solution that WE CAN, we’ve decided to spend more of our effort on our product and do less chasing after other products. Our goal is to give you on complete tool that will allow you to complete your projects successfully. If we had infinite resources, we would be able to do both – work on our product AND chase after other products. As we don’t have infinite resources, we need to prioritize.

      We’ve made a conscious decision to spend more of our resources on Toolset. Of course, we’re not alienating other developers, but we’ve stopped chasing after them.

      Have you tried our new Blocks? I’m very interested in your feedback and especially what must-have features you are still missing. I’m asking this because right after New Year, our developers are back to full time work and we want to work on what you need most.

      • Amir,
        I cannot wait for you to have a product ready for my current and future projects, I need solutions now and you have left me completely thrown away with my current project. Should I redo it completely after having taught my client some features that I cannot offer if I only use Toolset? I can not do this. It’s all very unfortunate. 🙁

        • Toolset Blocks is ready right now. Our own websites are already using it. We understand that redoing work is not a very fun project. We can help with some of it. We will not be able to rebuild your own site, but I’m sure that there’s a lot that our supporters can do to help you get things working faster. If you need any help to expedite things for your sites, please create a support ticket. There, explain exactly what we can do to help you. If you take this offer, please add another comment here with the link to the support ticket, so that I can follow up and see that our supporters deliver on this promise.

          • Thanks for the offer Amir.
            I have opened a support ticket in your forum, however, I have 2 inescapable quite complex requirements:
            1) That the web has exactly the same appearance it currently has.
            2) That is ready, at most, for January 3.
            I have already greatly delayed delivery due to problems with WPML and with Toolset and it is impossible for me to delay delivery more. 🙁
            Thanks for your help.

            • I’ve subscribed to this ticket and added instructions for our supporters. Between today and your tight deadline, we do have supporters working. To increase the chance of succeeding in this project, I recommend that you add specific questions to that ticket. Like I explained, our supporters will not be able to completely rebuild your site. They will be able to help you with whatever you do and you get stuck on. To really make this work, you should get started on this migration ASAP and then post questions in your ticket what you don’t know how to accomplish anything.

  8. Hi,

    Blocks looking promising but, as someone said earlier, it is very simple pages, without modern effects. I hope this will be covered in the next updates.

    But, my only concerns are how the blocks can build complicated listings (Views with relationships between CPTs, hierarchically related posts, post listings from IDs and other)?

    Thanks

    • Actually, dynamic sites with relationships and searches is where Toolset Blocks excels. The benefit of Blocks over any other page builder is the complete integration with fields and relationships. If you already tried Blocks, you probably noticed that for every field that you insert, you can choose (actually, need to choose) it’s source. When posts have relationships, you will see the related posts as one of the field options. Right now, we only managed to produce videos that show the basic usage. Our next videos will cover the more advanced topics.

  9. Amir: From an earlier reply to the Toolset Blocks announcement email:

    Yes, Dario’s video, “Using Toolset Blocks on Existing Toolset Sites” definitely helps.

    P.S. In contrast to many comments in this thread about Dario’s videos being to simplified, I think they are done quite well for a large new feature of Toolset that was very recently released. However, you must have anticipated as soon as you release T/B and designers start playing with it, of course they are going to be asking, “what about *this* feature”?
    As Dario is quite good at making these videos, it would be great to add a couple more, showing slightly more complicated page arrangements/layouts.
    And one suggestion for Dario is, to continue explaining what you are doing as you are actually doing it (e.g., dragging a new element block into a container.)

    P.P.S. I have been using Types-Views/Toolset for over 5 years now and love it. Recently, I had to quickly build two separate single page sites. For the first one, I decided to try Elementor, and although I liked some aspects of it, overall it has some shortcomings. For the next one, I decided to try Brizy and was far more impressed. Brizy has a much better workflow primarily because all container, section, and element settings are available from a right-click on any object. This saves a lot of time, rather than continuously moving back and forth from the sidebar to the content areat being built.
    I realize you are working hard on getting T/B stablized and adding more useful features. But, I am also wondering if there is any chance you might consider having a right-click context menu for Toolset Blocks, akin to that of Brizy? If you haven’t looked at Brizy yet, I urge you to take a quick look.

    Happy Holidays to you and the Toolset team!
    Jeff Safire
    –––––––––––

    • Toolset Blocks needs a lot of improvements to get a little closer to other page builders (DIVI, Elementor, Brizy, ..).
      Toolset would also need a good base theme to define in an easy and powerful way the header, footer and base elements of the page. The current market themes are really bad.
      I guess that within 1 year Toolset Blocks will not be a good contender against other page builders.
      Like the DIVI development team, versions with improvements and corrections should appear almost every week.

    • Thanks Jeff for your feedback. The right-click functionality is part of Brizy. Maybe this will come to Gutenberg one day. Until then, we’ll keep using Gutenberg API “as is” without hacking it. Any modification that we’ll do to Gutenberg will be very fragile. We are focusing our efforts on our blocks and their design features. Theoretically we could hack Gutenberg and add right-click functionality, but this will quickly have compatibility conflicts with themes, plugins and future Gutenberg releases.

  10. With Toolset Blocks can I no longer query User fields? When I go to create a new View in a page block, it only shows Post, Pages, Media, and Products (have WooCommerce installed) as available.