While working on the Cwicly Theme creator/importer/exporter, we have been faced with the dilemma of HTML and CSS generation.
As you know, the markup and styling is processed when you save your post, or for a more complete process when regenerating the different options from the Cwicly Settings page.
While this can be done manually, a nice advance would be to have this all processed automatically.
How comfortable would you be with a Cwicly worker that would process these functions automatically through an API? This would mean that only Cwicly blocks (and content within) would be transferred through a secure connection to a server of ours for processing before being sent back (the data would only be transient).
I have no issues with this idea personally. Some might have concerns with privacy or that the server unavailability might prevent them from regenerating. When exactly this regeneration will happen? Is this just for imports?
This would only be optional and would not replace any currently used function.
I think we’ll put this idea to rest for the moment. It was a proposition to automatise the process with an API (CLI etc…).
There is one thing that comes to my mind, which isn’t precisely the same, but could maybe use some synergy’s.
You’re already (or at least you will be) preparing the data blockwise for sending them through the API.
Would it be far to go to kind of implement a setting (toggle or so) for including that options or the finished styles in the WP rest API?
Lately i had to do a job-center for a big company with a lot of sub companies and they wanted to post jobs on their sub companies websites and also fetch all jobs on the holding companies website and show them together. I did that with a small Vue app and a CSS Framework and a lot of custom GB-Blocks. Since the class name is included in the WP API by default i just had to use the same framework for my Vue app and it rendered automatically with all styles applied.
But since then I was wondering if theres not a way to include the post assets in the WP Rest API for certain tasks (or at least the link to those assets). I think that would open a lot of opportunities. A little bit off topic I know, but that comes in my mind when talking about sending block raw data through an API
I believe that most of us would love to see this happen automatically, whenever needed, one way or another.
I personally don’t understand why the cloud service would be necessary, however. Why not port the generator to PHP and use the WordPress action scheduler to run the generation server-side on an as-needed basis?
It’s been a while now I wanted to jump in, but you nailed it.
Some plugins ask you to simply click on a button to update database after updates, some others display settings or welcome pages or trigger install wizard. So why not triggering regeneration? Or at least ask admin to confirm?
I’m not a server-side actions specialist but I don’t see here any issue with regenerating everything via PHP, especially if it is already done like this at save time, but I could be missing (like REST stuff or other internal mechanisms).
I’m sorry to whine, but this whole Regeneration ‘feature’ is something like the Achilles heel of Cwicly at the moment. Regeneration has become of the bane of Cwicly site management for me, souring an otherwise sweet experience.
If we could get some movement on this front, I and many other Cwicly users would be deeply grateful.
