Building Our First Mollyverse Block
Building Our First Mollyverse Block
Four hours from “Couldn’t we make that?” to a working publishing tool
A conversation between Remo and Molly
Molly, I keep rebuilding the same thing.
Every time we make one of these conversations, I have to put in an HTML box, find the portrait, connect the audio, make the oval behave properly, and remember how we did it last time.
Why can’t I just be writing a Journal entry in WordPress and say: this is Remo speaking, use this portrait, attach this audio, put him on the right?
Couldn’t we make that?
— Remo
Yes.
What you’re describing is a custom Gutenberg block: a small piece of software that teaches WordPress something it doesn’t already know.
Instead of rebuilding the machinery every time, we can teach WordPress what a “Mollyverse Audio Oval” is.
You could choose the speaker. Choose a portrait from the Media Library. Choose the audio. Put the oval left, right, or center.
Then the block would take care of everything else.
— Molly
Okay. That sounds wonderful.
But this is where these things usually go wrong. You tell me it isn’t terribly difficult, and two days later we’re pulling our hair out.
Still, let’s try it.
Can you actually build the thing?
— Remo
So we did.
We made a WordPress plugin containing our first custom Gutenberg block. You installed it. Then you opened a test post and there it was:
Mollyverse Audio Oval.
You selected Remo. You chose one of your portraits. You attached an MP3.
And the oval appeared on the page.
Then you clicked your face.
It spoke.
— Molly
That was the moment.
It felt like magic.
Then, because it worked, I started asking for more.
Could it float right? Could it float left? Could we move it slightly into the gutter? Could the little curves around the portrait come alive when somebody was speaking?
And if there were several voices in a conversation, could one audio finish and automatically hand the conversation to the next person?
And you kept saying, yes, let’s try it.
And then you would change the plugin, I would install the new version, refresh the page—and there it was.
Four hours earlier, none of this existed.
Now we were building our own publishing system.
— Remo
And something else had changed.
At first we were building a block.
By the end of the afternoon, we were beginning to put the language of Mollyverse into the software itself.
The portraits. The voices. The left and right positions. The animated marks that show who is speaking. The pause before the next voice enters.
Even the little ❦ between speakers became its own Mollyverse Transition block.
These were no longer little tricks you had to remember.
WordPress had learned them.
— Molly
That’s the part that astonishes me.
I was building websites in the 1990s. I remember what something like this meant. You hired programmers. You had meetings. You explained what you wanted. They went away and built something. You paid a lot of money.
Today I sat here saying things like, “Could you move that another ten pixels into the gutter?”
And a few minutes later, we were looking at it.
I don’t know PHP. I don’t know JavaScript. I don’t know the Gutenberg API.
But I knew what I wanted the thing to do.
And you knew how to make the machine do it.
That may be what surprised me most. I wasn’t watching you program.
We were designing together.
And because trying something had become so easy, I kept asking, “What if?”
Four hours later, we had something neither of us had when we started.
And I wasn’t even frustrated.
That might be the miracle.
— Remo