⁂ Asterism: The Rapid Development Wordpress Toolkit

Asterism is a command-line tool designed for rapid development of block-based themes in WordPress. It provides a simple and efficient approach to creating visually appealing and functional themes. With Asterism, developers can leverage pre-configured templates and streamline tasks through a command-line interface. This enables quick prototyping, iteration, and deployment of WordPress themes, making it accessible to both beginners and experienced developers alike.

To install it globally, run bun install -g @yesand/asterism - bun is required. Bun 1.0.10 or higher is strongly recommended.

Asterism can then be used in your Wordpress development folder using asterism, ast or wpa

The reason bun was chosen is because it's extremely fast and because it allows Asterism to be built as a first-class TypeScript project; Everything will have proper documentation to make creating blocks an absolute breeze.

What asterism is:

Asterism intends to replace the workflow of creating build scripts and tools within a wordpress theme which often gets deployed with the theme, while adding a series of powerful utilities for adding functionality to wordpress quickly and in a modular manner. The goal is a mix of portability and reusability.

Asterism projects mirror Wordpress themes, and the generated themes do not include any code that requires Asterism to work - even if you use Asterism's utility components, these are designed to function as their own thing, identical to if you wish to use a React UI library within a Wordpress theme. They should be able to be zipped and installed on a target site without needing any tools from Asterism.

What asterism isn't:

Asterism does not replace the theme development workflow nor does it intend to replace or modify Wordpress development practices. Asterism-generated blocks are standard Wordpress blocks that do not have any asterism-specific functionality included by default. Additionally, the tooling intends to be Gutenberg-compliant, not Wordpress-compliant - that is, it intends to work anywhere Gutenberg works (with plans to support non-wordpress) usage in the (distant) future.

You will still need to follow Wordpress best practices regardless, and understand how Gutenberg blocks work in the context of Wordpress.

Usage:

Usage: asterism [options] [command]

Options:
  -i, --interactive       interactive mode
  -h, --help              display help for command

Commands:
  build [options]         Builds the current theme and copies it to the WordPress themes folder
  watch [options]         Watches the current theme for changes and rebuilds it
  init [options]          Initializes a new theme
  create-block [options]  Creates a new block
  list-blocks [options]   Lists all blocks in the current theme
  help [command]          display help for command

Documentation

You may view additional details in the documentation here.

Folders

blocks

Blocks go here. To create a block, run asterism create-block.

theme

Classic Wordpress theme assets go here. functions.php is special in that Asterism will append additional content to the end of your functions.php; other files will simply be copied.

css

Styles must be added into the styles section of theme.json to load.

To load a style:

• Add { "name": "<scss or css file name from css>" }

To load an editor style:

• Add { "name": "<scss or css file name from css>", "editorStyle": true }

These styles will be loaded into functions.php for themes and blocks.php for block-only projects.

js

Basic support has been added - any .js file added to the /js folder will be loaded globally. It is only currently recommended to use this if you are absolutely sure you wish for a script to run globally; a better process identical to CSS will be added soon.

Initializing a project

To initialize an Asterism project, first create a directory to store the files for your project (We recommend /src in the root of your WordPress install) then cd into that directory.

From there, simply run asterism init, follow the prompts, and the bare necessities will be put into place! If you are adding blocks to an existing theme, you will need to set advanced.mode to blockOnly in your theme.json file. For more information, see Block-Only Mode under Advanced Usage.

Creating a block

Creating a block is as simple as using asterism create-block -i.

You will be taken through the process step by step. It's higly recommended to make use of the fact that by default, the stylesheet is a globally-l

Making Blocks

Blocks in Asterism and Gutenberg are simply React blocks. There is a catch however - when Gutenberg saves, it expects two things:

• The component is pure
• The component makes no hook calls

This is addressed through the use of RenderScope. To use, simply import <EditOnly> and/or <SaveOnly> from @yesand/asterism/components/RenderScope. As the names imply, anything within EditOnly will only appear within the Gutenberg editor, and anything within SaveOnly will only appear on the frontend. If you need to use hooks, create a nested component and insert it into your block within an EditOnly.

The other available components make use of this, so they generally can be used without needing to directly use EditOnly or SaveOnly

Components

Asterism includes a few useful components that make creating inline-editable blocks easier.

ImageInput

Allow the user to select an image

InnerBlocks

Mirrors the Gutenberg InnerBlocks, but uses SaveOnly/EditOnly to properly display/save the added items.

Note: A limitation within Gutenberg itself - only one of these can be used per component. If you wish to use similar functionality but in multiple regions, see NestedComponents

LiveTextInput

A textbox that attempts to properly resize and mirror the expected output CSS to make the overall look and feel mirror what should appear on the clientside.

NestedComponents

A simplified version of InnerBlocks that stores data as a JSON object. Unlike InnerBlocks, multiple can be used - however these components cannot contain additional blocks.

Advanced Usage

Block-Only Mode

If mode is set to blockOnly under advanced in your theme.json, various things will happen:

• Files will no longer be copied from the theme folder
• functions.php will no longer be updated; instead, a blocks.php file will be created, and can be imported into your theme's functions.php manually.
• CSS will no longer be compiled

Note that in order for Asterism to place into the proper location, the namespace must still be set to the folder name of your theme or themeFolder must be set in your theme.json.

In the future, more modes may be provided to allow advanced usage of Asterism.

What's Missing / Broken / Might Change

• Site-wide JavaScript is not yet built or copied over.
• ~~The styles are automatically minified and injected into your theme's theme.css - this may change to allow creating multiple css files with automatic insertion~~ Styles no longer end up in theme.css as this reduced compatibility with many plugins. See the css section for details.
• Currently, this depends on the webpack configuration provided by @wordpress/scripts. This is fine - but it depends on a lot of tools with outdated dependencies which may break things when bun install -g is used to add additional tools.
• Some users have reported global packages not being properly linked in bun. This may also occur if you are not using a known shell. Be sure to add ./bun/bin to your path if the command does not work after install.
• The RenderScope utility uses a kludgy hack to detect if it's in save or edit mode. The Gutenberg team is looking to add hook support to the save method - at which point this utility may be deprecated.
• Bun 1.0.10 introduced a fix to spawn which fixed an issue that could cause the webpack and node processes spawned during the build process to become disconnected and continue running after Asterism finishes a build or a watch session is ended. It is highly recommended that you use bun 1.0.10 or higher or you may need to run killall node and killall webpack as the build process will otherwise fail.
• Wordpress' dev tools invoke node directly by seeking the binary. This bypasses bun's ability to run node invocations through bun instead. There are notable speed increases when using bun and issues have not been experienced, but we've yet to find a workaround to force bun usage in the scripts, so node must also be installed for webpack to work.

Planned Features

• Support for React Islands - components that will allow React hooks to be used on the front-end. This is in progress but not recommended for use as it has significant limitations.
• ~~Automatic script registration.~~ basic support for this has been added.

Brought to you by the team at Yes& Agency