Gutenberg Block Styles Plugin

Overview

This repository is an introduction to one of the simplest forms of customization in the editor: Block Styles. Block Styles just add an extra classname to a block, so they're relatively simple to create and customize.

Read more about block styles in this ThemeShaper post:

📄 Customizing Gutenberg blocks with block styles

This repository is a WordPress plugin that includes a single custom block style. It's fairly barebones, and is meant to provide a boilerplate for more complicated plugins. The code here is a lightweight introduction to Gutenberg block customization, and doesn't require you to mess around with npm, themes, php, or (much) JavaScript.

All you really need to get started is:

• The courage to edit a few lines in a single PHP file.
• Knowledge of CSS.
• A WordPress site to upload this plugin to (Alternatively, you can run a single Terminal command to create a quick development environment instead).

Customization

Adding + editing block styles is a three step process:

1. Open up the index.php file and adjust the block type, name, and label for your new block style.

For example, the built-in example adds a "Blue Paragraph" block style to the core Paragraph block:

register_block_style(
	'core/paragraph', // Block type name "paragraph" including namespace "core"
	array(            // Properties of the style
		'name'         => 'blue-paragraph',
		'label'        => 'Blue Paragraph',
		'style_handle' => 'block-styles-stylesheet',
	)
);

Here's another example, adding an "Awesome Cover" style to the Cover block:

register_block_style(
	'core/cover', // Block type name "cover" including namespace "core"
	array(        // Properties of the style
		'name'         => 'awesome-cover',
		'label'        => 'Awesome Cover',
		'style_handle' => 'block-styles-stylesheet',
	)
);

• The block name in the second line should refer to the official title for the block.
• The name Property should be lowercase letters with hyphens. It is used to generate the class for your block style.
• The label Property should be human readable, and probably translatable.
• The style_handle Property needs to be the handle of a style previously registered using wp_register_style()

If you'd like to add multiple block styles in the same plugin, duplicate those 8 lines and replace the Properties.

2. From there, add the CSS to style your new block style.

Block style classnames are automatically created using the following format:

.is-style-[name]

[name] maps to the name: field from step 1. So the classnames for the two examples above would be:

.is-style-blue-paragraph .is-style-awesome-cover

Open up the style.css file, and add any CSS styles for your block. Anything you declare should be added to both the front and back end automatically.

3. Test your changes.

Zip up the plugin with your changes and upload to your site, or if you'd prefer, test the changes in real-time using the included Docker-powered dev environment. 🎉

More Documentation

• Block Style Variations in the Block Editor Handbook
• Server-side Registration Helper in the Block Editor Handbook (This is the method of registration used in these examples.)

Questions?

Happy to help! Open an issue (or a PR!), ping @kjellr on twitter, or @kjellr on WordPress.org slack.