Improve block style preview in edit mode (Block Model 3) #5

PLIP (Plone Improvement Proposal)

Responsible Persons

Proposer: Dante Álvarez (@danalvrz)

Seconder: Víctor Fernández de Alba (@sneridagh)

Abstract

The community has been experimenting in improving the developer experience and lower the effort required while developing new blocks or customize the existing ones. We were also wondering if we could streamline and improve the editor experience at the same time, so the goal of this proposal is to address both.

Motivation

While developing a block, there are some cumbersome problems in the block engine:

• duplicated class names definitions across several block wrappers, specially in edit mode
• lack of standarization in the wrappers, so everybody does it their way
• the StyleWrapper has to be enabled per block, for each block as it's not part of the engine

Assumptions

The implementation of this PLIP is tied to the PLIP: #53
Since it will assume that some degree of the foundation of the new theming has to be in place for the BMv3 happen.

Proposal & Implementation

Right now, there's been experimentation and the current development of the PLIP happens in this PR in @kitconcept/volto-light-theme.

kitconcept/volto-light-theme#370

Deliverables

Assuming a basic implementation of the new theming system in place, this PLIP will deliver the BMv3 in the core block engine.

Risks

This has to be part of Plone 7, since all the add-ons should adapt to use the BMv3, and remove their own wrappers in favor of the new ones, provided by Volto itself. There's already some examples of how to implement the adjustments needed:

https://github.com/kitconcept/volto-button-block

This can be achieved easily by passing a block config as explained in here:

https://github.com/kitconcept/volto-button-block/blob/main/README.md#support-for-block-model-v3

Participants

Dante Álvarez (@danalvrz)
Víctor Fernández de Alba (@sneridagh)