Introduction to the block editor

The WordPress block editor is a modern, drag-and-drop block editor offering a great content creation experience.  By using blocks you can create custom posts and pages without needing coding knowledge or third-party solutions. With blocks, you can insert, rearrange, and style content in WordPress. What types of content? Here’s a small sampling (we’ll go over all of them later): Tables Images Videos Paragraphs Quotes Shortcodes Social media (YouTube, Facebook, etc.)…

Published 11 January 2022
Andy West

Andy West

The WordPress block editor is a modern, drag-and-drop block editor offering a great content creation experience. 

By using blocks you can create custom posts and pages without needing coding knowledge or third-party solutions. With blocks, you can insert, rearrange, and style content in WordPress. What types of content? Here’s a small sampling (we’ll go over all of them later):

  • Tables
  • Images
  • Videos
  • Paragraphs
  • Quotes
  • Shortcodes
  • Social media (YouTube, Facebook, etc.) embeds
  • Widgets

The articles in this folder will give you a overview of how to use the different blocks. In this article you will get an overview of the editor. 

How do I Use the Block Editor in WordPress?

With the background information out of the way, it’s time to walk you through the new block editor.

We’ll start with how to navigate it:

Block navigation

  1. Add a new block
  2. Undo and Redo buttons
  3. Content structure (word count, headings, paragraphs, blocks)
  4. Block navigation (a drop-down displaying all the block types used in the post)

Sidebar navigation

  1. Preview and Publish the post
  2. This is the classic WordPress sidebar: categories, tags, permalink, and publishing options
  3. Block settings: when you click on a block in the editor, you get its unique set of options in the sidebar
  4. Hide sidebar
  5. More editor settings

How to add a block

In your WordPress dashboard, create a new post as you would normally. (Or, open an existing post so you can edit it.)

Click on the plus (+) sign in the top-left corner of the editor.

Select the category and the type of block you want to insert:

Each block can be edited, deleted, saved as reusable, and moved up or down with drag-and-drop options.

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