This post is not about WordPress.com. It is about WordPress.org – the version of WordPress that you can download and import into your own self-hosted website, as many people do.
Although this posts is not about WordPress.com, I think there are lots of people who do have their own self-hosted sites as well as sites here on WordPress.com, and that is my reason for posting it here.
By way of background – at the moment, Gutenberg is available as a plugin for self-hosted sites. Soon though it will be added to the core code of WordPress.
It occurred to me today that some of the extra Gutenberg blocks that people are making, and which are available as plugins, could start to clutter up sites with lots of plugins.
So I asked a question.
I have asked this question today everywhere I can think of.
I have asked it on the Gutenberg forum and on the Gutenberg group on Facebook, and on WPTavern, a website that specialises in all things WordPress. I have had some answers already, and some surprises.
The Question
So – to the question, which is this:
I am going to ask a question as a non-developer, perhaps as a typical user of Gutenberg when it reaches core.
At the moment, Gutenberg is a plugin. A few people, Mike McAllister and Danny Cooper to name two, have made additional blocks that are available as plugins.
When Gutenberg goes into core, I will want to use some additional blocks (pricing tables from Danny Cooper would be an example).
If that block is in a collection of blocks available as a plugin I could add the plugin.
I could then end up with many plugins, really only wanting just one or two blocks from each plugin, and perhaps lots of repetition because the different plugins cover a lot of the same ground.
In an ideal world, I don’t want extra plugins on my site if they don’t need to be.
Is there a way I could extract the blocks I want, keep them and remove the plugin? Would reusable templates enable me to do this?
Is there a different way to do it? Will there be a repository of just blocks and only blocks that can be exported to a site without the need to add a plugin at all?
So that’s it. I’ve had some answers from a few developers already and I will crystallise those into something when I have more of a handle on it and post it here.
Comments more than welcome!
Photograph Works 