10up
Distribution of Reusable Blocks
I see a prior post on a related issue, https://github.com/10up/distributor/issues/296, written two years ago. In this post, the author suggests "a work-around" converting to a regular block before pushing which would require getting everything right before doing so, or else edits must be done in multiple sites.
I'm writing a separate post to see if this can be elevated in priority, since wp_block in the wp_posts table in phpMyAdmin is native to WordPress.
The beauty of reusable blocks is they are the closest thing to "includes," for those of us with a history of developing sites with PHP prior to WordPress. For a company with divisions, for example, when creating pages specifically to distribute to sub-sites for unlinking and further modification, the common sections could remain globally "linked" to the reusable blocks for future updating. When something needs to be updated in the reusable block, it could carry through to the sub-site even if the page or post is unlinked from the distributed post.
I have 49 reusable blocks. My mistake for not first understanding that they would be stored in the parent site and not available in the sub-sites.
@madriverweb we're looking at some broad updates to how Distributor handles push vs. pull, internal vs. external connections, and custom and reusable blocks as part of our 2.0.0 release. I'm slating your issue for the release after that to give us time for further testing, but if there's any further details you can share about your setup (multisite vs. multiple WP instances, WP version, etc.) then that'll help us triage... thanks!
This is a multi-site, assume always latest or close to latest WP version, keeping everything up-to-date. Parent company with four divisions that share a lot of same/similar page content and post news that is exactly the same across divisions. Although they will continue to create and share news posts after launch, I was also interested in how much this tool could help me during development. Create everything in parent site, push to sub-sites, unlink pages and modify. This part will still happen as planned.
Today's surprise was more related to learning that the reusable blocks don't exist as part of the overall WordPress block repository and that they exist only in the parent site. So if your tool could push them, that would save the conversion to regular blocks in order to push the pages, and then re-creating the reusable blocks in each sub-site* and reinserting them in the pages. The company website admin will then have to switch between sub-sites to do work that could be done in the parent site if they remained linked.
*Actually, depending on how soon you implement this, I could wait to recreate the reusable blocks in the sub-sites in case I could re-link the pages to the pushed blocks. We are launching this month, but recently created material may not need update for a while.
Not sure if that was the level of detail that you were seeking. Very happy still to have found your product, because the ongoing news posts were the original use sought. Thank you for all your good work!
@madriverweb we are looking at custom and reusable blocks as part of our 2.0.0 release, but that's most unlikely to be ready this month as we're only early in the requirements definition for that scope of work. Again, if this is a more urgent/important need for you / your client then we can chat about alternative options for you (email me if so desired: [email protected]).
Would be great to have this feature - still doing my workaround of converting to static HTML before distributing. It works, but this would be much more convenient and also prevent those blocks from just disappearing - for a long time I was distributing without even knowing that the reusable blocks weren't showing.
I wonder if a simple interim would be to have a pop-up warning if there is a reusable block? Just so the user is aware that the block won't distribute
