Chapter 6: Extending the Block Editor

As mentioned a few times thus far, a large evolution in WordPress functionality came in version 5.0 with the introduction of the Block Editor, also well known by its development codename, Gutenberg. While the original page editor was quite functional and had been supporting content creators for many years, it did not provide full What You See Is What You Get (WYSIWYG) functionality. More specifically, users building a complex website were often required to use shortcodes that are only seen once a page is saved and viewed on the site, or even had to type in HTML code. Of course, many third-party plugins (Visual Composer, WPBakery, Elementor, Divi, and so on) saw this as an opportunity to provide more advanced page building interfaces, eventually leading to the WordPress development team creating their own solution with the block editor.

The block editor introduced a new content creation paradigm with an array of building blocks that can be added...