Take Your Patterns, Map Them Out, and Don't Forget Your Wallet

This week's issue focuses on some of the tools I've been working with the past few days. Whether it's trying to figure out the best layout with patterns, crunching to make a sitemap in 20 minutes, or sharing a premium license with a client, these are all tools I'm very happy exist for us today! Enjoy and as always, feel free to forward this email to someone you think might need it or share on social media. Cheers! 🥳

I just happened to see Munir Kamal tweet about this new web app he's created for GutenbergHub called Builder. It lets you explore all of the Patterns that are in the public pattern library and add them into a page layout. This is all done on the front end, without any of the normal WP-Admin UI around it, making it easy to just see the patterns in their almost natural state. I love things like this because it makes it feel one step closer to front end building, which is where I really see the value and future of the Block Editor. You can see an example I put together or go ahead and play with it yourself. Once you have something you like, you can copy the code and paste it into your WordPress post.

A few weeks back I featured Rafal Tomal's Design Kit and now I think it's important to also share his other outstanding tool, QuickFrames. I've been using this for the past few months on side projects and it has greatly helped me visualize the sitemap and general user flow of my websites in a more visual way. It runs on Figma, which I love, and is setup with soooo many small tricks that once you play with it for 10 minutes you'll never go back to making sitemaps any other way. I used to be a big OmniGraffle person back in the day, and this has completely brought me into modern times with a process that just feels good. You can check out an example file as well to see how it all works.

OK, this is one of those ingenious ideas that makes you say, "why didn't anyone do this sooner"? Who knows, but I do know that I'm loving how simple this is. I do some freelance work on the weekends and the struggle of how to handle premium theme and plugin licensing has always felt like an awkward dance with clients. So far, this has taken the difficulty out of that whole process. It's one of those tools in my belt now that I can't see doing anymore client work in the future without.