I’m currently full on in the process of building a full site editing Block Theme to replace my blog’s current theme, Tabor. While diving into this project I’ve explored a few areas where I can improve my personal publishing flow.

The first was bringing editor comments into Gutenberg with my Markdown Comment block, and today I am releasing a second in that same vein: the Todo List block. 

Todo List is a simple, editor-only block designed to quickly add tasks directly within the editor. 

When drafting an idea for a post, like most folks, I typically start by composing an outline of what I want write about. A common workflow of mine is to take thoughts, ideas and questions, then form them into actionable tasks such as researching, learning, or exploring ideas. 

Todo List makes it easy to keep track of those tasks, all in the context of a particular post. You may also use it to add a publishing checklist to the post, such as using a headline analyzer, adding featured images, adding social images, etc.

When drafting content, the ability to take a snippet of text and convert into an actionable task is something I’d expect to be able to do. So I baked in a few block transforms. I’m a huge fan of blocks transforms and how they improve the WordPress publishing experience. Being able to morph a block into another, without loosing content/attributes, is a powerful way to level-up editing. That saying, you may transform paragraph text, list items and even editorial comments added by Markdown Comment directly into actionable todos, just like you can in the iOS Notes app for example. You may even take multiple blocks of the sort and convert them all into a single todo list.

Todo List also supports block prefixes, which are keyboard shortcuts in a sense, to toss blocks in the editor with a few keystrokes. Adding [], or -[] plus the space key will add a Todo List to the page. Too easy.

I’m really interested in blocks and experiences that level-up publishing; not just provide content (although those are just as important).