Block v3: an in-canvas edit mode, as v2's mode: edit had
C
Charlie George
We are asking for a v3 equivalent of v2's in-canvas edit mode: a block's fields rendered in place in the canvas, where the block sits on the page.
The context, briefly. Our blocks declared "acf": { "mode": "edit" } and editors filled the fields in place, on the page, seeing the block in its real context. WordPress 7.1 now always iframes the block canvas, and v2 guards against that by forcing preview mode and hiding the edit toggle, so v2 blocks became readable but uneditable. Moving to v3 is the correct fix and we have done it. But v3 offers no in-canvas form at all: the options are the Block sidebar or the Expanded Editor.
Neither replaces what was lost. The Block sidebar is too narrow for real field layouts, where repeater columns collapse into each other and image thumbnails land on their captions. The Expanded Editor is a good form, but it covers the page, so editors lose sight of the thing they are editing.
The frustration is the abruptness. In-place field editing is how ACF sites have been built and how editors have been trained for years, and the upgrade path removes it with no equivalent. For an agency with a large estate of client sites, that is retraining every editor on every site, to work around a UI gap rather than a design decision.
Done would be a v3 block able to render its fields in the canvas, in place, as v2 could.
M
Mark Mercier
I agree with all of this! I'll add-on that another thing the Expanded Editor lacks is the capability to edit multiple blocks essentially simultaneously.
Besides wanting to stick with a strictly content-focused editing interface, my other main reason of sticking all of my blocks permanently in edit mode is to avoid having to spend time finessing the back-end editing interface that users will never see. At its very best, the Gutenberg editor is still an approximation of the front-end view.
Restoring the v2 in-canvas editing system would be ideal, but if that's not logistically possible with the WP Core changes that forced this, I have a potential idea.
I was reading about the Inline Editor introduced in ACF 6.7 and think it might be able to be leveraged here. I'm imagining a parameter in the block registration that either uses an actual, intentional render preview, OR uses a "v2 edit-style" render preview.
For that latter version, instead of loading the layout and styles from the theme, it would override them with code from ACF that comes as close as possible to the layout of a traditional v2 style editing experience. I assume for most of the field types, we'd need to use toolbar editing or open the EE for repeaters and such, so it still would add some extra clicks to the editing process.
It's not the ideal solution, but that could get much closer to the original behavior of being able to edit multiple blocks nearly simultaneously, being able to retain the context for the overall arrangement of blocks on a page, and not having to waste time finessing the back-end of our sites that visitors never see.