My first custom block plugin

Well, my first ever plugin to be submitted to WordPress.org actually 🙂 .

Last Christmas, I added a custom, static image block with Christmas decorations to my theme Christmas Sweets. This was the first theme in the directory to include blocks for the new block editor.

Later, the Theme Review Team on WordPress.org decided that themes are not allowed to include blocks, and I removed them.

Now that WordPress 5.0 has been released, the plugin with updated blocks and a few additional images has been approved and added to the plugin directory. You can download the plugin here.

The blocks are basic and I did not need to change much of the code from last year to make them work again.

Unfortunately a lot of the documentation that is available is out of date, and I was not able to add alignment toolbars, so the images are now centered by default.

I admit that the mix of ES5/ESNext examples and tutorials that are available are confusing. (And I’m not a fan of React error messages.)

Even though I have taken Zac Gordons Block Development course, I ended up sticking with ES5 and build on the existing code instead of rebuilding the blocks.

Submitting the plugin to the directory was nothing but smooth, and it was approved after a few hours. I was able to use svn for the first time in many years to add the plugin files to the directory, so I’m happy with that :). Now I just need to add some images to market the plugin.