Wondering what Paul Charlton picked up this Black Friday? Hint, his purchases were all Bricks related and he provides a short preview of each one.

Jamie Marsland shared a video on Twitter where he did an experiment. He tried to use Bricks without doing any training first. It was a bit painful to watch because I would have expected Jamie to have noticed the “Templates” menu, which is a common feature with the Site Editor, and the Border styling for rounded corners, which is common with the Gutenberg block options. However, when everything is unfamiliar it is easy to missing things.

I think the video highlights some of the pain points for new users of tools like Bricks. Bricks, Oxygen, and Cwicly allow you to create all of the templates for your site. They don’t just allow it, but require you to do so. This is a large connotative disconnect for new users. It would be better, I think, to provide a very basic set of templates, like wire frames, for people to get started. I actually thought Bricks did that, but perhaps that is in the child theme(?). Cwicly doesn’t.

Here is a good discussion between Dave Foy and Josh Hall. Talking about page builders and Bricks.

Here is a tutorial from the Meta Box team showing how to create reusable banners using Bricks and Meta Box.

I’ve thought that Bricks is a great place to use ACPT for your custom data plugin and Paul Charlton has created this very good walk-through on how do so.

This video shows the direction that the Bricks team is taking with components.

Bricks Advanced Themer 2.1 from Maxime Beguin is now available. Advanced Themer is a toolbox focusing on CSS class and variable creation and management, helpers in the Bricks editor focused on theming, and much more. The great thing about it is that the features are modular and can be enabled as you want to use them.

This Saturday morning I caught up on the livestream with Paul Charlton and Dave Foy. It is a good discussion of Bricks and will be of interest to people thinking of giving Bricks a try and for people just getting into Bricks. They talk about how they came to choose Bricks, what its strengths are, and different ways to get started.

Bricks 1.9.2 beta is now available. There are updates to the Form elements with the ability to save submissions into the database, hcaptcha and turnstile integrations, and more. More form related enhancements are planned for the future. Also added is the option to set custom authentication pages for login, registration, lost and password reset.