TinyMCE per block: Adding the block inserter menu

[youknowriad]

No categories or keyboard navigation for now but it's good enough for a V1

[aduth]

Something I've toyed in my other recent prototypes. Would it be worthwhile to try to reuse logic from parse, and force the implementation to accommodate for an "empty" block to parse? I think there's a clearer need in my case where I have to ensure a common markup structure between creating and preparing an existing node for edit, though I quite like that it avoids breaking the saved <-> edited mode duality when adding a third case for creation.

[youknowriad]

I'm not sure yet. I thought about it, but there's also the transform case, which I think is a better candidate to be merged with the create. We can see the create as a special case of transform with an empty content.

By transform, I mean switching block types, And I was thinking about like:

const rawContent = oldBlock.content; // (some way to extract content from a block)
const newBlock = newBlockDefinition.create( rawContent )

What do you think?

[aduth]

Yeah, transforming is tricky 😄 I'd put some thought into it, but didn't make a whole lot of headway. One problem is trying to find a common "base content" type (rawContent in your snippet). Is it a string? How do blocks declare whether they can support transforming?

I'd also wondered since we'll need to preserve backwards compatibility, and perhaps to avoid treating paragraphs as formal blocks, a block could register patterns that it can identify and be instantiated from.

Some rough pseudo-code:

match: [
	{
		pattern: wp.shortcode.regexp( 'gallery' ),
		// RegExp -> Element
		initialize: function( match ) {}
	},
	{
		selector: 'p',
		// NodeList -> Element
		initialize: function(  ) {}
	},
	{
		block: 'foo',
		// WPBlock -> Element
		initialize: function() {}
	}
]

[youknowriad]

mmm, nice idea I was hoping to be able to use only the WPBlock -> WPBlock initialization flow but this introduces some coupling between the source and the destination block.

---

Back to the create problem above. As you said, this is probably mergeable with parse. I have a personal preference over having it separate instead of handling an empty block as input. We could reconsider later.

[aduth]

I have a personal preference over having it separate instead of handling an empty block as input. We could reconsider later.

That's fine, let's see how it works out 👍