I recently updated the WebTNG website where I replaced Toolset with Crocoblock JetEngine. Toolset has announced that the project is in maintenance mode as they evaluate the impact of the Full Site Editor on their business. Meanwhile, all of the other plugins for working with dynamic data have been moving forward at rapid speed. With WordPress, as with technology in general, if you are not moving forward then you are losing ground, so I decided to switch away from Toolset and use JetEngine. Crocoblock has been adding Gutenberg support to their plugins and JetEngine is the cornerstone of their plugin suite. In fact, JetEngine is something of an all around beast, it has a ton of features, and is a good fit for the site. In this post I want to share the unexpected “gotchas” or issues I ran into during the move, as well as the nice wins, or “goodies,” where I was happy with what I found.
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Gotchas and Goodies
It was a pretty big move so I went about it carefully and did a lot of testing. Of course still I ran into a couple of issues while performing the upgrade. In this post I’ll review the process, the steps, and what I learned, or what was Boss (great), what went sideways, and what I really like about the result.
Gotcha – BBQ Firewall rule triggered by long string
I ran into an issue when trying to access dynamic data using Crocoblock blocks.
It turned out that the Crocoblock request string was very long and that triggered a firewall rule. Disabling the rule fixed it.
Gotcha – Limitations of JetStyleManager
The JetEngine blocks don’t have a style tab like other Gutenberg blocks. Instead, you get style options by adding another plugin, JetStyleManager. When you do, the style options are accessible by a pencil icon in the Gutenberg editor.
When I was working with the list item, the display in the editor did not match what showed on the front-end, so I add CSS while viewing the page in the Customizer and then copied those styles into the Crocoblock list item properties.
Gotcha: Kadence Blocks support JetEngine, but you need to manually type the field names
With Crocoblock’s own blocks all of the custom field names showed when adding dynamic content, but when using Kadence blocks, JetEngine is supported, but you need to manually add the custom field name.
Goodie: JetEngine Listing Flexibility
Toolset Views let you create a listing of your data that you can insert everywhere and you are not limited to showing a listing just in an archive. Some blocks let you show posts in a grid, but they don’t usually allow you to use custom fields. Crocoblock’s JetEngine is very flexible as you can use the listing grid anywhere on the site. For example, this page has a listing included in the middle of a regular post.
Goodie: JetEngine’s Powerful Query Builder
The JetEngine query builder is much more powerful than you usually find with Gutenberg solutions. You can query different WordPress object and specify granular conditions. The Listing option together with the query builder is a powerful combination. It may seem like more work to create a query separately, but once you get the hang of it then you see the flexibility it brings.
Goodie: Extensive Display Conditions for Blocks when using JetEngine
JetEngine adds the “eye” for specifying display conditions to core, Crocoblock, and third party blocks.
Rather than display conditions, what you get is really a very deep condition builder GUI.
Good Performance Scores when the move was complete
I was happy to see that performance scores were good.
Discussion and Conclusions
Overall I was very happy with the switch from Toolset to JetEngine. I hope that this real world experience is interesting and helps you to take advantage of JetEngine’s great features.
