I use Oxygen extensively on my projects, but I like the idea of creating easily editable blocks/sections for my clients, so they do not have to learn anything about using Oxygen. If I am understanding the Pinegrow philosophy correctly, this is one of the advantages of Pinegrow.
However, I cannot find any docs or tutorials on how to use Pinegrow and Oxygen together. Can anyone give me some clues please? Many thanks in advance!
Hi @chapman387
I’m a fellow Oxygen dev, having used it exclusively for several years. That said, I haven’t used Oxygen on a new project for over a year now thanks to the stagnation of the builder and the rapid rise of Bricks. Not to mention almost the entire core of the Oxygen community has switched to the Bricks community, and the Oxygen community used to be one of its biggest appeals.
WPDevDesign → BricksLabs
OxyExtras → BricksExtras
OxyUltimate → BricksUltimate
Automatic CSS → Abandoned Oxygen for Bricks
Frames for ACSS → Bricks exclusive
Design kits for Oxygen, incl. Core, OxyMade etc. → basically all abandoned whilst Bricks has amazing, fast growing options like Bricksmaven, Fancy Bricks etc.
Even the team lead of Oxygen, Elijah, can be found attending to customers in the Breakdance FB group. When was the last major feature added to Oxygen? Wasn’t it the advanced query builder back in June 2021? Everything since then it tiny stuff, largely already covered by 3rd party addons.
Sorry for the tangent.
Imo, you’d do well to consider either switching entirely to Pinegrow or replacing Oxygen with Bricks. If the Oxygen way of life speaks to you, then Bricks will speak to you 500%. And Bricks has a components update coming later this year that could be a game changer. I.e. think custom Gutenberg blocks/Webflow Symbols.
That said, to answer your question, Gutenberg blocks play very nicely with Oxygen (and Bricks). After all, inserting post content into templates is a core feature of any modern WP site and both builders support that.
One way you could do this in Oxygen is set a full-width Inner Content area on a particular template, and then that page will automatically render your Gutenberg blocks within that space.
An extreme example of this that I recall from a little while back was from the dev behind Smart Slider 3. He claimed SS3 was faster than Oxygen and there were many comments making fun of him. So he created a basic header and footer template in an Oxygen sandbox and made the entire remainder of the demo site with SS3 blocks in Gutenberg.
Lo’ and behold, the site was fast as hell.
Thanks @Bryn.
I appreciate your comments and advice.
I will confess to have never, ever used Gutenberg as I started out with Oxygen before Gutenberg came along. So on each new site I install the Classic Editor plugin and get on with it using Oxygen!
Before Oxygen I used Flexsqueeze, which was ahead of its time, but then abandoned by the developer. Then I used Thrive Themes, which was a short encounter! Then on to Oxygen. To say that I have invested a huge amount of time in Oxygen would be an understatement! If I decide to start using the Pinegrow WP plug-in, I will have a very steep learning curve, and I need to be sure it will be of use to me. I am not sure if I want to jump ship and enter the Bricks ecosystem at the moment, as it has taken a while for me to move all my clients sites over to Oxygen.
Anyway, I will invest some time and explore Pinegrow, and see where it takes me!
Thanks again for your thoughts.