Broadside Blocks is the companion plugin to the Broadside theme. It provides the
seventeen blocks that make a WordPress site read like a newspaper.
Why a plugin and not part of the theme? Because WordPress is right about this.
The Theme Directory forbids a theme from registering blocks, and the test behind that
rule is a good one:
Themes handle presentation. Plugins handle content.
Anything you lose when you switch themes belongs in a plugin.
A Short Answer, an FAQ, a Sources list — that is content. It lives in your post. If
it shipped inside a theme, changing theme would silently blank it and you would have
no way to get it back. So it lives here, where it is safe.
The editorial blocks
- Short Answer — a direct, quotable answer at the top, for the reader in a hurry
and the search engine that wants to cite you. - Key Takeaways — the three or four things a reader should leave with.
- Table of Contents — builds itself from your headings. Rename a heading and the
contents follow; there is nothing to keep in sync by hand. - FAQ — questions and answers that also emit valid FAQPage structured data.
- Sources & References — the receipts.
- Disclosure Table — a comparison table whose partner links are always marked
rel=”sponsored nofollow” and which always prints a disclosure line.
The masthead furniture
Nameplate, folio rule, utility bar, colophon, byline, author bio, editorial standards,
the newsletter panel, the section grid, related stories and the lead-story well.
It needs the Broadside theme
These blocks render the theme’s Customizer settings and call its template tags. Under
any other theme they render nothing at all — deliberately, and without a fatal error.
Install Broadside;
WordPress 6.5+ will offer this plugin alongside it.
Copyright
Broadside Blocks, Copyright 2026 Shadow Software LLC.
Distributed under the terms of the GNU GPL v2 or later.
It bundles no third-party code, no images, no icons and no JavaScript libraries.