Why WordPress Core needs more blocks

Over the years, I have been an ardent supporter of keeping WordPress lean and letting plugins and themes do all the fun, custom stuff. But the block paradigm shifted everything. And moreso, it shifted everything about building WordPress themes.

Today, my perspective has changed, and I’ve nestled into the camp of those calling for more blocks in WordPress.

Let me explain why.

A journey

Let’s jump back in time for a moment. Three and a half years ago, just before the release of WordPress 5.9, themers were in complete control of the front-end output of WordPress sites. 

Well, that’s a bit of a stretch. They were actually in control of everything but the content. Of that, they mostly had styling control. It was much like the previous 18 years where you would have the freedom and flexibility to build whatever you wanted. 

But in the few years leading up to that point, the landscape had begun changing. Themes had to be compatible with new types of output beyond the basic paragraphs, headings, lists, and media. The Block Editor had been on the scene for a while before WordPress 5.9, but theme authors still exercised almost all the control they had in the past.

Once you started building block themes, suddenly what was possible shrank very, very quickly.

Want to include breadcrumbs? You need to add support for a breadcrumbs block, but which one?

Need an accordion? Maybe you could manipulate the Details block, but that may not be an accessible approach.

How about including SVG icons? You guessed it; you need an icon block for that.

And have you ever experienced what the UI looks like when a user doesn’t have a supported block installed?

Eeeek!

Gone were the days where you could just include anything and everything. It’s like painting on a canvas with a limited color palette and set of brushes when you previously had every tool at your disposal.

Now, truly great artists can make magic happen regardless of the tools. Things like the Block Bindings API can fill in some of the gaps. But some features are just darn hard without a dedicated block.

Before block themes, theme authors enjoyed loads of new features over the years, but how and what you could build mostly remained static, the only limitation being the technology of the day. Block themes created the potential for more people to take that first step into the world of theming without knowing any code whatsoever. And they introduced the standards that so many of the inner community had called on for so long, created better interoperability with plugins, and brought contemporary technologies to WordPress.

But the cost was a limited toolset that required new ways of thinking from us old timers who’d been merrily doing our own thing for so long.

It’s an exciting world, but it could be more exciting in the next stage of this journey.

The case for more Core blocks

I am a developer. I love tinkering with anything and everything. I even dabble in creating custom plugins, but my true passion is creating WordPress themes. I’ve probably written just as much on the subject as anyone over the years. It’s safe to say that I know the technical limitations of block theming as much as anyone can reasonably be expected to (though I’m still learning new things all the time).

So when Matías Ventura, the Project Architect of Gutenberg, opened a ticket calling for more niche blocks in WordPress, it piqued my interest. The list of potential blocks were:

• Icons
• Playlist
• Slider/Carousel
• Stretchy Text
• Tabs
• Accordion
• Mega Menus
• MathML
• Marquee
• Table of Contents
• Time to Read
• Breadcrumbs
• Dialog

Admittedly, I chuckled at the thought of a Stretchy Text block actually being included in Core. But the more I dug into what it takes to actually implement the design, I could see the case for it. I certainly don’t see a good way of using it in a theme design pattern without a dedicated block.

And marquees? Were they not relegated to a long dead era when Geocities ruled the blogosphere? I miss the old days of the wild and wacky web. Could be fun. 🤔

It’s easy to get tangled up in the weeds, using the most niche blocks as arguments against components like accordions, tabs, dialogs, and table of contents, which are standard pieces of the web as we know it today.

If you recall, I said earlier that I was a longtime supporter of keeping Core lean. The old WordPress was very much a development framework. But as a theme author in the block theme era, I’ve moved much closer to the thoughts that Ventura espoused:

I think not having these blocks in the core library severely limits the expressiveness that theme builders (and users) can depend upon to build great designs and it can fracture the overall experience.

There have been many moments in the last three years where I’d have 95% of the work done, speeding toward the finish line of a block theme project. Then I’d smash into a brick wall. Quite often that wall was a missing design component. 

I’ve been in the development game long enough to find workarounds, but it’s been at the expense of untold hours of development time that could’ve been better spent elsewhere.

And if I’m at the top of my game, what hope is there for newcomers who have bright ideas and big dreams? Will they be able to build that unique design they have in mind? Or will they switch to another platform?

So…I want more blocks. 

I want more possibilities. 

I want to make ideas come to life without spending a week figuring out how to pigeonhole some feature into a place it doesn’t belong just to make things work.

To include or not include

I hope that you at least agree on one point: For block theming to progress, WordPress needs a mechanism for theme authors to fully express their ideas. 

Everything beyond that is implementation details. Ventura’s proposal for additional blocks has garnered a lot of discussion over the past month both in the ticket and elsewhere around the community. There’s wide agreement and disagreement on some or all points.

Chiefly, whether the more niche blocks should be bundled is of concern. Things like future compatibility, potential legacy baggage, and bundle size are worth discussing. There’s also the potential for Core/Canonical blocks that Ventura proposed in 2024, a set of blocks built and maintained by WordPress contributors but not shipped with the platform itself. I’d even be happy with a method of auto-installing supported blocks when a user activates a theme.

Frankly, I don’t much care how we get there—just that we do. And I hope that god-forsaken “your site doesn’t include support for the [name] block” message never graces the screen of one of my theme’s users.

Let me bundle patterns with icons that users can swap out as needed:

Let me create accessible accordions without manipulating the Details block:

Just let me create something beautiful.

Props to Birgit Pauli-Haack, Anne McCarthy, and Héctor Prieto for feedback on this article before publishing.