If you are using the WordPress Block Editor, there are multiple sources of WordPress blocks you may want to consider adding to your own toolset. These include the blocks that are released as part of the WordPress core platform, blocks available in the official Block Directory, and plugins that include one or more blocks. Many functional plugins like WooCommerce, Yoast SEO, leading form builders, and others are now providing blocks as alternatives to shortcodes. you can also build your own custom blocks.
Here are some interesting blocks that our design and development teams have evaluated recently. They are good examples of blocks designed to address specific use cases.
Bookmark Card
This block enables you to “embed” a card for any URL which will show the title, featured image, excerpt, and site name. There is a vertical and horizontal format. There was a nice overview of this block on WordPress Tavern a few weeks ago. The link to the plugin is here. The card is well designed and is a great way to embed URLs. The only issue we saw is you can not set the target. The developer recognized this and is looking at it.
Yoast Breadcrumb Block
Breadcrumbs can help both search engines and site visitors to more easily understand the way your site is structured. The Yoast SEO plugin has supported breadcrumbs for quite a while, but adding them could be cumbersome. Yoast has released a free block that will let you add breadcrumbs anywhere on a page or post. This video will give you an overview:
Table of Contents Blocks
We have been looking at a couple of WordPress blocks that enable you to generate a Table of Contents for a longer post or page. Yoast has one that complements their other blocks and is pretty functional. We are using this for our newsletters. You can see an example here. The Gutenberg team recently announced that they have added a Table of Contents blocks as well. It hasn’t officially shipped in a Gutenberg release but is targeted to Gutenberg 10.2. The block that will be included in the core will have some limitations like not generating anchor links automatically. You can read an overview of the new core block in this recent post on WordPress Tavern.
What In Your WordPress Block Toolkit?
We do recommend having a limited set of WordPress blocks that you use. You should avoid using multiple blocks that do the same thing. This will make using the block editor simpler and also can have performance implications. That said, there are a growing number of WordPress blocks like these that are being developed and supported by the WordPress community. Have you found any you have added to your “block toolkit?”
See something of interest?
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