Interactive WordPress blocks refer to blocks that enable user interaction or engagement directly within the content. These blocks can include elements like forms, buttons, polls, quizzes, and more, allowing visitors to interact with the content rather than just passively consuming it.

Let’s dive headfirst into a GitHub treasure trove of interactive WordPress blocks. Some may be old, some are new, but nevertheless, there are some interesting finds if you are willing to search.

Quick note, though: in general, it’s recommended to stick with plugins and blocks that can be found in the WordPress Plugin Repository. This plugin marketplace is more than convenient; it has proven to be essential to a great WordPress experience. The repo helps ensure a higher level of quality control.

Below are some fun, interesting, interactive WordPress blocks available on GitHub. These particular blocks exemplify the power of WordPress and where we can expect future WordPress blocks to take us.

Apple Maps Block

The past is the past, and you’re ready to give Apple Maps another chance. Good for you! Apple Maps has been quietly improving and offers a pleasant and modern design and experience. The Apple Maps Block plugin gives you the option to add an Apple Maps interactive WordPress block to your site. This plugin does require you to have or create Apple MapKit credentials. Find it on GitHub.

OpenStreetMap Block

The OpenStreet Map Block allows you to select different tile layer providers like OpenStreetMap, Mapbox, or Stamen, so it has a unique flexibility. You can also adjust map behavior through import/export location data. Unlike Apple Maps, there is no API key required at this moment. There is also a setting for watercolor maps. Now that’s creative! Get the OpenStreetMap Black on GitHub.

Charts Block

The Charts Block adds a selection of colorful chart blocks to your theme. The Data for your chart can be adjusted in a CSV file and then uploaded. I found that these blocks worked better when inserted into a column block to contain the size. Find it on GitHub.

Chart Block

This plugin offers a chart block that can switch between different chart types, such as lines, bar, horizontal bar, and pie. Unlike the previously mentioned block, the Chart Block requires that you paste or type in your CSV data in a field.

I’m not sure how this would act with a large data set, but it should be fine for a simple chart. Go to GitHub to access Chart Block.

360 Image Block

This plugin allows you to add images with a 360-degree camera to be viewed and panned on your site. 360 Image Block even makes non-360 images feel a little bit 360. There is also a sister plugin that handles 360 videos. Find both 360 Image Block and 360 Video Block at GitHub.

Honorable Mentions

These interactive WordPress blocks are also worth checking out.

• Chatterbox – Text Message Bubble Block
• Syntax Highlighting Code Block

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The owner had set up a self-hosted WordPress and already installed a theme. As a developer, I wanted to know about her challenges and her experience as a WordPress newbie. Her main goals were to get a website running and for it to be towards the top of a relevant web search. For this individual, the challenges are broken down into the following ways.

Buying and Trying WordPress Themes

The business owner searched for themes and found some that looked great. After purchasing, she would struggle to get the site to look like the product images that sold her on the theme. She even had to return one.

The WordPress themes she was gravitating towards were not using the WordPress block editor but a third-party editor. I logged into her CMS and was confused myself. How many editors does a website need?

There are a lot of themes out there that come with their own page editing user interface that replaces or augments the WordPress editor. So the line between WordPress and the third-party theme can become blurry and confusing.

Plugin Collecting

Another issue that was occurring was excessive plugin installation. From my experience as a developer, I’ve worked on websites in need of a rebuild that have 50-60 plugins installed. That’s a lot!

I suspect what is happening is some website owners end up using plugins as an avenue of problem-solving. I don’t blame them since a search regarding a website issue will often result in a solution in the form of a plugin. As a result, the website collects plugins as the years pass, possibly increasing the vulnerability of the website if any one of them is not maintained. This is a huge WordPress security issue.

Understanding WordPress Jargon

This entrepreneur also found the terminology of the web world to be confusing at times. For example, themes assume the user understands the difference between parent and child themes. A WordPress beginner is likely coming from a different industry than website technology and can find themselves lost with all these ideas and concepts.

Blocks, components, widgets, and modules… oh my! A resource she found useful was YouTube. There is a good selection of beginner WordPress tutorials that can explain a lot of the terminology we use in the industry. In addition, WordPress has extensive documentation and has a published glossary.

WordPress Hosting

While it is not a WordPress-specific challenge, it is worth mentioning. Between DNS records and any required server provisioning, finding the right managed WordPress host for your website can be a pain point for a lot of people, especially if you are not familiar with the task.

The good news is once you get it set up, you don’t always have to make a lot of adjustments going forward. If this is unfamiliar ground for you, then I suggest a turn-key solution, and luckily many hosting providers have an option.

Some Advice for WordPress Beginners

Know Your Website’s Purpose

If you have decided to put up a website, ask yourself, “What is the purpose of this website?” The answer could be to inform potential customers of your product or service and to make contact, often through a form. Another answer might be to sell your product on the site, such as eCommerce. It’s important to answer this question early on because it’s going to be a compass for you when determining the solutions you’ll need.

Discover WordPress.com

If you choose to go with WordPress but don’t want to mess with hosting or third-party editors, WordPress.com might be a good place to start. It offers you a WordPress turnkey solution. This is a good way to jump right in with the least amount of confusion. If you end up liking it and you need to move your site to your own server, there are export options to make that fairly easy.

Practice Plugin Pickiness

Regarding plugins, it’s important to be a little picky when adding plugins to your site for security and performance reasons. There used to be a rule In the Drupal community known as DMV, which stood for documentation, maintainers, and versioning.

When you go to add a plugin to your site, check that it has updated documentation about how to use it. Also, check that there are people actively maintaining and providing updates. As of writing this, the WordPress plugin market has a field labeled “last updated” to help make this easier.

Partner with a Pro

If you’re migrating a large-scale enterprise company website from another platform to WordPress, you may want to enlist the help of a professional developer. That’s where WebDevStudios comes in. We can migrate your site from any platform to WordPress without missing a beat. After a successful migration, we can even train you on how to use your new WordPress website. Contact us to talk about it.

Good luck, and remember WordPress has a strong community, so finding support is not difficult. Feel free to comment on this blog post if you have any questions.

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Outside of the computer running the software, user acceptance testing can be very low tech, only requiring a spreadsheet and a stopwatch. The stopwatch is kind of an exaggeration, but if the user journey takes too long, you lose the user.

So you do want to keep performance in mind incase it becomes a barrier for the user in completing the steps. The spreadsheet is the checklist where each test sequence is laid out. A collection of test scenarios is called a test suite.

Example of User Acceptance Testing (UAT)

An example of a test scenario might be as follows:

• Navigate to the homepage.
• Click “contact us” link.
• Observe contact page loads.
• Fill out contact form completely.
• Submit form.
• Verify no errors are present and thank you message displays.

Each point starts with a verb followed by some element of the website. You’ll notice that these steps are pretty simple and a lot of this can be automated for extra testing coverage.

However, you don’t want to skip the human powered UAT because it will be an avenue for reporting unexpected issues and behaviors in the software.

Who can conduct UAT?

Anyone.

User acceptance testing can be done by anyone on the team. It can also be a great task for anyone working adjacent to the project team looking to get involved.

There are arguments to be made that the tester probably should not be the developer, mainly due to blind spots. You can always have more than one person conducting UAT. The more eyes on a project, the more bugs that can be surfaced.

When should UAT be conducted?

After an update has been pushed to an environment.

UAT is a safety check to make sure the expected high level functionality of the site is still intact. A safety check to ensure the site is still useable to the user.

The Importance of UAT

User acceptance testing is the most important testing because it ensures your website and its purpose for existing is still intact. If you spend hundreds or thousands of hours developing software that is unusable to the end user, its basically worthless.

The downside to UAT is that it doesn’t provide the developer with a lot of details about where the issue is occurring. In our example test scenario above, there can be many reasons why the user could be unable to submit a contact form.

It could be a backend issue keeping the whole page from displaying or a frontend bug that is displaying the form incorrectly. This is why it’s important to make informative bug ticket once you do find a bug.

Bug Reporting

Here are some best practices for creating a bug ticket. Ultimately you want a ticket to be useful to the developer and the person who will be testing once the fix is complete.

The first thing the developer is going to do is try and reproduce the issue. Your ticket needs to provide all the necessary information for them to do that. For website testing it makes sense to include the following:

• Consistent title formats
  • An example could look like, “Homepage – Image carousel not rotating”
• A description of the issue
  • It can help to include which step you were on when the failure occurred.
• A link to the page where the issue is occurring
• A screenshot of the issue
• Mention the device/OS/browser being used when issues seen.
  • Macbook/MacOS/Safari

Things to avoid:

• Nesting multiple issues in one ticket
• Creating multiple tickets for the same issue

Conclusion

By implementing user acceptance testing, you can save yourself from a lot of headaches later. Hopefully now, you understand the importance of it. Contact WebDevStudios when you want a team to test the performance of your website.

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