If you haven’t tried Telex yet, I’d highly recommend it. It’s a super cool tool to spin up specific, custom WordPress blocks. You describe your idea, and it will build a WordPress block for you. It even saves your project and context so you can pick it up later.
We’ve already started using Telex in our day-to-day work on the Special Projects team. Telex is excellent for spinning up a prototype or demo to align on what we want to accomplish before it goes into design or development.
Telex isn’t perfect yet, but it’s been amazing to see the massive improvements on every iteration. I’ve found that it sometimes helps to use some WordPress-specific knowledge or language. For example, for the Image Scroll Reveal block, it took a few tries to get the image upload and replacements right before telling it to use the MediaPlaceholder component.
So, on to the blocks:
Image Scroll Reveal
An image-reveal block is something I’ve come across a few times while reading immersive, interactive stories. An Image Compare block already exists for sites on WordPress.com, but requires user intervention to reveal or compare images. Having it reveal automatically is a cool element of digital storytelling that gives the article a little extra oomph as you read and scroll.
It took about 50 rounds of back-and-forth with Telex to get all the details right and add all the settings I wanted. That’s still not bad, considering it’s actually quite an intricate block that accounts for different screen heights, scroll positions, and image sizes.
Features
- Automatically reveals an underlying image as you scroll down the page
- Controls for animation direction, fade width, object fit, and resolution
- A combined caption text for both images
- Ability to quickly swap between top and bottom images
- A preview of the transition
Demo
I’ve put together a few examples below of different directions and fade widths. His name is Charlie, btw.
Top-to-bottom transition with large fade width:
Left-to-right transition with no fade width:
Side by side, bottom-to-top and top-to-bottom, tall images:
Download
You can check out the Telex project here:
https://telex.automattic.ai/projects/ee0193cc
Or download the plugin with the block:
Live Reading Counter
What has happened since you started reading this post? A little statement at the end of a longer or mission-driven article is a cool way to wrap it up. I’ve found these to be both funny and impactful. For the Live Reading Counter, Telex got this one quite decent in only 5 tries(!).
Features
- Set the increments per second
- Insert text before and after the counter
- All typography and text styling controls
Demos
Since you started reading, 0 seconds have gone by.
You can also wrap and nest in layout blocks and elements:
Since you started reading, a bamboo plant has grown2
0 cm
Download
Check out the Telex project here:
https://telex.automattic.ai/projects/71fe44b7
Or download the plugin with the block:
Check out Telex for your next block!
- This is unfortunately true. Source: UN Global Forest Resources Assessment 2025: https://openknowledge.fao.org/items/090d2fbb-32a6-412b-a3b8-1ce5c5905df2 ↩︎
- Also true. Source: https://www.guinnessworldrecords.com/world-records/fastest-growing-plant ↩︎
One response
Cool 🙂