Extends the power of WordPress

It sounds like you’ve been on a journey @acurran and that’s really great to see. You note that things are just starting, what would you love to see as a feature?

@karmatosed – One feature I’d like to see is a way to control what blocks are included. i.e. so that one could remove unneeded blocks to a) clean up the interface for the website authors, b) reduce unneeded bloat. Even just some constants or an array in wp-config would suffice for configuring which blocks are loaded, or even a function that can be added to functions.php.

@acurran that’s a great idea, sort of like a custom configuration of blocks? There is a way you can do this using code but that would maybe need customization like a plugin. It’s interesting saying about wp-config or functions.php.

I created an issue to bring discussion over to the GitHub repo: https://github.com/WordPress/gutenberg/issues/18606. If you have additional thoughts please add them to that issue.

Hi @acurran there currently are three ways to solve the problem you mentioned, one in the UI and two via code.

Gutenberg provides a settings menu via the vertical dots in the top right corner of the screen. In that menu there is an option called Block Manager. Once clicked you will get an UI where you can deselect any blocks you don’t want available in the editor.

If you want to do it via code in a theme or a plugin you can either use the allowed_block_types hook to manually create the list of available blocks (including core) or you may deregister at run time one block at a time with wp.blocks.unregisterBlockType.

@andraganescu That’s great, Thanks for enlightening me! Do any or all of those 3 approaches prevent loading of resources associated with the unused blocks on the front end of the website?

@karmatosed What really got me fired up about Gutenberg was when I started building my own custom blocks using the awesome custom block creation tool Lazy Blocks. As a website designer/developer I can custom tailor the admin interface to my client’s needs. This allows me so much more flexibility, power and elegance than my pre-Gutenberg approach which was to use ACF to create custom fields for the page/post editing interface along with shortcodes. I also tried out page builders in the past but quickly tired of them and found them unsuitable for my clients. Actually I wrote a blog post on why I don’t like page builders – https://sww.nz/why-wordpress-page-builders-suck/. I plan to write my next blog post on Guttenberg and Lazy Blocks as it has so revolutionized my WordPress experience.