WordPress has amazed us with outstanding WordPress blocks. Now, everything is possible with WordPress blocks. You can craft an appealing website, awesome pages, and attractive posts with the help of the excellent blocks available there. One can add media, texts, widgets, embed links, and design a website with a beautiful layout and outlook. WordPress blocks offer a flexible and easiest way of customizing the website’s content and appearance.
WordPress version 5.0 introduced another collection of blocks, the Gutenberg blog editor as a default block editor over the classical editor. It has added a new way of designing pages and content. Recently, there are more than 90 WordPress blocks available including images, headings, tables, buttons, videos, calendars, social icons, and more.
What are WordPress Blocks?
WordPress blocks are the components or modular piece of content that helps in making a site stunning and appealing. With just a simple drag-and-drop functionality users can edit, arrange, and create an incredible site and content. These blocks are individual, customizable elements that take the place of standard text and image editing frameworks.
All of the WordPress blocks are user-friendly, simple, flexible, and easy to use, and have a large variety of customization options. Though there are variations in WordPress blocks, users with little knowledge of WordPress and codes can also perform and craft amazing designs because of its drag-and-drop interface.
Types of WordPress Blocks and Their Uses
When creating a site, content, or pages users use different types of blocks aiming to build amazing and desired designs and appearances. An attractive layout allures customers or viewers and it is indirectly connected to increasing traffic and business growth. Excellent use of WordPress blocks can be a blessing for your site and content so be mindful while utilizing the blocks. The Block Inserter categorizes the blocks into 6 types: Text, Media, Design, Widgets, Theme, and Embeds. Let’s have a closer look at each block.
Text Blocks
Text blocks mainly focus on the different ways of displaying content. You can design your text in various forms. There are ten WordPress blocks in the text blocks section; Paragraph, heading, list, quote, table, classic, verse, code, pull-quote, and preformatted.
Basically, you can add a Heading for the title and topic, and Table to compare, a List to emphasize, and Quotes for someone’s saying. Likewise, the Pullquote block helps to draw attention to a text excerpt. Code and Preformatted allow you to highlight code snippets. Another Verse block is mainly used in poetry that lets you add extra spaces between words and line breaks within the block. The Classic block offers the ability to edit as HTML, duplicate, or convert to blocks.
Media Blocks
Media blocks access to upload media files on your site or posts. Adding media makes your posts and pages more reliable, attractive, and informative. For this, you have to upload media from the media library or insert a URL if needed. Media blocks consist of 7 blocks; Image, Gallery, Video, Audio, cover, File, Media, and text.
Image block lets you add an individual image whereas Gallary block access to add images in a collective form inside content. The file block can accept any file type and embed them on the site. Similarly, a Video block is for adding video, and an Audio block is for adding audio within content or pages. The Cover block helps to display an image or video where you can add text and other content. Media & Text block uses to place an image or video side-by-side with text.
Design Blocks
Design blocks work on the appearance and layout of the blocks. These blocks are not for designing content but let you constructing the layout or outer interface of the pages and posts. Design blocks consist of 9 blocks. They are as follows; Button, Columns, Group, Row, Stack, More, Page Break, Separator, and Spacer.
Basically, a button block is used to create a button to add links to other pages or to draw attention to visitors. Columns block lets you create 6 different types of columns and insert image text or content. Similarly, Row and stack blocks let you arrange horizontally and vertically and insert any blocks inside it as you want. With More blocks, you can keep the blog post concise where the initial part of the post will get displayed. To read the full content, you have to click on read more.
Page Break block accesses to split your page into multiple chapters that add pagination or break pages for posts and pages. This block is suitable for multiple pages and posts. A Separate block is used to break 2 blocks of contents, sections, or ideas with a horizontal line. Alike Separator, the Spacer block let you keep spaces between blocks where you can customize the height of the spacer.
Widgets Blocks
With the arrival of the Gutenberg block editor, widgets are available in blocks. With just drag and drop you can add widgets anywhere on the pages or posts including the footer and sidebar. There are altogether 13 widget blocks available. It consists of Archive, calender, Categories list, Custom HTML, Latest Comment, Latest posts, Page List, RSS, Search, Shortcodes, Social icons, Tag clouds, and Contact form 7.
The Archive block helps to organize your previously published posts by month so that readers can easily view the old post. If you want to allow your visitors to quickly find a post-by-date Calender block will help you with that. With the Categories list block, you can display a categories list of posts that are previously published by category. Custom HTML block enables users to insert code, change blocks, and preview in real time.
Well, the Latest Comments block displays the most recent comments that a reader has left in response. The Latest post block helps to show the new or recent post on a page or a site. Besides, Page List allows displaying a list of your site’s page. Whereas RSS block displays content from any site’s RSS feed on your website. Contact form 7 block is to insert contact forms.
A search block is used to add a search option or function to a website so that users can reach fast to the desired post or pages. Shortcodes help in embedding files and creating objects with less effort. Social icons let you display social media icons like Facebook and Instagram on web pages. Tag clouds are to exhibit a list of up to 100 of the most popular tags you’ve assigned to your posts.
Theme Blocks
Themes blocks are also very essential blocks in building a site. Identification and arrangement of posts and pages come under this section. It helps in managing the whole site from header to footer. Altogether there are 27 blocks where you can work basically on-site and theme design.
There are 15 blocks related to posts such as Post list, Post title, Post excerpt, Post featured image, Post content, Post author, Post date, categories, tags, Next post, Previous post, Read More, Comments, and Post author biography. With these blocks, you can add a title, featured image, content, categories, date to a post, author name, and biography.
Download categories and download tags display the assigned taxonomies of categories and tags. The Avatar Block allows you to insert the avatar image of either the Post/Page author. The Query Loop allows you to display posts based on the parameters you specify.
Similarly, there are more blocks that are based on site identity, site header, and footer including template parts as well. Navigation, Site logo, Site Title, Site tagline, Template part, and Login/out are some theme blocks you can use for your benefit. Well, you can upload your company’s logo, create a company name as a title, and give your site a tagline. A navigation block is to place a menu of links on any page to help your visitors navigate to other parts of your site. The log-in/out block displays login and logout links on your site.
Embed blocks
The Embed block lets you add content from a third-party site to your post or page. You can transform an embed into a Paragraph, Columns, or Group block. The embeds block consists of 32 blocks. You can easily copy any URL and paste it into your site. You can enclose links, videos, and content from Embeds, Twitter, Spotify, Pinterest, Youtube, Tiktok, WordPress, Soundcloud, Vimeo, Flickr, Animoto, Cloudup, and Crowdsignal.
Likewise, there are some other embeds blocks you may know DailyMotion, Imgur, Issuu, Kickstarter, Mixcloud, Pocketcasts, Reddit, ReverbNation, Screencast, Ted, Tumblr, Slideshare, Scribd, Speaker deck. Moreover, you can copy URLs from WordPress.tv, SmugMug, VideoPress, Wolfram and Amazon Kindle.
Yes, WordPress accesses us to copy any URL from the available embed blocks. That means you can link any video or content with ease with just a simple step. Or if you can’t find the desired platform on embed blocks you can use the Embeds block to copy URLs from any other third-party site.
What are custom Blocks?
By default, WordPress offers several WordPress blocks for users’ flexibility. But custom blocks are not created by the WordPress core team. Custom blocks are the outcomes when developers want to do something specific for a website, and can’t find that specific functionality in blocks and plugins. Anyone who uses WordPress can create a block or a group of blocks. In general, custom blocks are the developers-made blocks of content that offer more customization adding additional features and functionality. If you are searching for themes made of custom blocks and WordPress blocks you can check WordPress Active Themes for it where you will get elegant block-based themes crafted beautifully with WordPress blocks and Custom blocks. It helps in creating unique and engaging content that can help you stand out from other websites and engage your visitors.
Conclusion
Yes, With all the available WordPress blocks, you can create an awesome block-based theme or website with astonishing pages and posts. In addition, blocks have made it possible to have a full site editing experience. With no code or zero technical knowledge, users can create an awesome site with ease. Isn’t it cool! WordPress blocks have made the website building experience and workflow easier, better, and more stunning for all types of users.
If you need more functionality you can create your own custom blocks or WordPress block plugins to expand the block library and provide more customization tools to fulfill your design needs. Do you know, our expert team has created multiple custom blocks(Rise blocks) to provide additional functionality in blocks?
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