Can I build reusable blades to be used on basic pages with Frontity?

Hello Frontity Community!

My name is Scott. I work for a Web Development agency. We create a lot of traditional WordPress sites with PHP and ACF Pro.

We are looking to modernize our process a bit and take advantage of the speed and ease of building with React over PHP.

I am certain Frontity can easily replace our process for building blog detail pages and other post type detail pages.

My question is related to building basic pages out of sections (blades). We generally build out a design and each horizontal section is reusable on any basic page. Does Frontity have this type of functionality out of the box?

Sorry for the newb question. I am doing high level research and trying to decide on a platform. Thanks in advance for your help. Regardless of the answer, I really like what some of you have built and look forward to building with Frontity!

I’m not 100% sure I correctly understood your question. But as a rule of thumb, any component, block or anything reusable that is used on WP, and arrives as HTML in the REST API, will need you to create a custom React component to recreate its behaviour on Frontity.

Usually, you will parse a page with html2react, and in the easiest case you will just add some styling to match what you have in WP. If the component requires interactions, or is more complex, then you need to create a processor, and a component.

EDIT: I’ve seen people build amazing stuff this way, creating Gutenberg blocks that reused somehow code from the React components used in Frontity, mapped also to a Storybook library. The user ended up having total control of the parts that where used in the different pages. Really amazing work, but it is definitely not out of the box.

Thanks orballo.

I appreciate your response!

Thinking in terms of React components. I would like to be able to create a basic page. Then add any react component that I have created in any order, by entering the content directly in WordPress.

A user would select a component such as “intro-with-cta”. Once they select that component they have access to the predefined fields; eyebrow-text, title, subtible, cta-text, cta-link. Then they could add a different component below that, followed by another “intro-with-cta” if they like.

On the highest level a content author could add a component, then enter the content for that component, then add another all the way down the page.

It doesn’t necessarily have to be “out of the box” as I suggested. But if it’s possible with Frontity I think my team will give it a go.