Editorial Blocks
This plugin adds Gutenberg blocks that are useful for blog, magazine, news and any editorial site: post grid, post list, post hero, post group and author list.
The plugin adds blocks and nothing else. There is no settings page, no dashboard widget and no onboarding wizard — you add a block, set it up in the sidebar like any core block, and you are done.
Blocks
- Post Grid — posts as a grid of cards, with a column count each for desktop, tablet and phone.
- Post List — posts as a list of rows, each with a thumbnail beside the text.
- Post Group — a featured cluster: one lead story with the rest of the posts beside it, either as a single rail or as the classic three-column homepage layout with the lead left, centre or right.
- Hero — one story, shown large, with the image above the text, beside it, or behind it.
- Authors — a grid of author cards, each with an avatar, bio and latest post.
Choosing the posts
Every block picks its posts the same way: by number, category, tag, author, or an explicit list of post IDs — and each of those can be excluded as well as included. Post Group and Hero can also take their lead story from somewhere else entirely, such as your sticky post or the newest post in one category, and the block will make sure that story does not then repeat further down.
Section headings
Every block can carry a heading above it — «Latest news», with a «See all» link beside it — set in the block’s Heading panel. Leave the text blank, which is how a block starts, and no heading is shown at all. The heading can be aligned left, centre or right, and can have a rule above it, below it, or running along beside the words.
Post titles
Post Grid and Post List let you set how big a card title is — small, medium, large or huge — and, separately, which heading level it prints as. They are two different questions: the size is how the title looks, the heading level is where it sits in the page’s outline. So a small title can still be an h2. Leave the size on Default and the title keeps whatever size your theme gives that heading.
Notes
Blocks render on the server, so a block always reflects your posts as they are right now — editing or publishing a post updates every block that shows it, with nothing to re-save. It is also the same code that draws the editor preview, so what you see while editing is what the page will show.
Styling is deliberately minimal. The blocks lay themselves out but inherit fonts, colours and heading sizes from your theme, so they look native rather than bolted on.
Credits
The comment icon is «message-circle» from Feather by Cole Bemis, used under the MIT licence.
Recommended Theme
The blocks work with any theme. They lay themselves out and inherit fonts, colours and heading sizes from whatever theme you run, so there is nothing to match up and no theme you have to switch to.
That said, they were built and tested against our own Rural Blog theme, which is free on WordPress.org. Rural Blog sets the CSS variables the blocks look for, so the blocks pick up its spacing and type without any work from you, and the two were designed to sit together on an editorial front page.
See it in action on the demo site.