Planning out the Next Generation of Post Kinds

I’ve been working on the Post Kinds plugin for several years now. It allows the enhancement of WordPress posts into the Indieweb types of posts.

But in the current environment, the question I keep getting asked is: When will it support Gutenberg, the WordPress block editor?

This is something of a problem for me as I do not know how this would work. I really need to talk it out with someone more embedded in the Gutenberg world and see what ideas come.

So, to prepare for that, I need to make a major shift in the way I have Post Kinds set up to disconnect further what happens on the frontend to what happens on the backend. And since Gutenberg uses the REST API to get data, I need to add an endpoint to work with this.

So, there are a few experiments in this regard I am working on. In a previous version of Post Kinds, I switched from storing metadata about a photo in the photo post to storing it in the attachment. WordPress uses a custom post type for attachments to store information about video, audio, images, etc.

This means you can edit the attachment, and separately attach it to the post. So, one of the first things I want to do is enhance that, and add the ‘citation’ post type I’ve been contemplating.

Loosely inspired by the old WordPress links manager, this would store the metadata for individual URLs. It would be necessary as I want to be able to turn my website into a Pinboard-esque bookmark archive. Not every bookmark is to be shared in my feed, or even public.

So, ones that are shared would be attached to a post, similar to the way attachments are. But otherwise could be addressed as simply bookmarks.

Over the last week, I experimented heavily with a simple fields API to generate the forms fields by configuring an array. The idea here is to define the fields I need for any given post kind, and therefore generate them automatically, rather thanm writing templates.

So, both of these ideas are elements of what I want to build. The challenge is the UI to bring these pieces together. It is going to require some trial and error on my part to get it right.

Right now, after having merged in the Fields file, which I will eventually hook up to the form interfaces, I will be finishing the Citation Edit UI, and then seeing how I can link that to posts, taking the attachment model.

Then working on how to properly save and edit the combined post.

Thoughts?