The Block Bindings API was launched in WordPress 6.5 and it allowed you to “bind core blocks to read from different sources without needing to write custom block boilerplate”. In WordPress 6.5 and WordPress 6.6, this was all done via code and there wasn’t a UI yet to bind blocks to different sources. For WordPress 6.7, work is underway to change that with an initial experimental PR merged to enable a UI and a follow up PR underway to improve upon it in order to remove the experimental flag. This is a big change and opens up even more pathways for folks to directly take advantage of this new feature.
To help ensure the work is progressing well, I wanted to invite folks into testing similar to what I did with Data Views. This time I enlisted the help of Justin Tadlock and am reusing a WordPress Playground instance he created of a book review site that implements the Block Bindings API. From there, I added in a few steps to install and activate Gutenberg with the UI for Block Bindings experiment enabled. Here’s the full setup for anyone who is a nerd and/or curious.
Here’s a quick video of me just simply exploring the experience to give you a sense of what you can do. As a reminder, here are the current supported attributes:
| Supported Blocks | Supported Attributes |
| Image | url, alt, title |
| Paragraph | content |
| Heading | content |
| Button | url, text, linkTarget, rel |
What can you find and report in the Gutenberg GitHub repo while trying out this test environment?
To see updates and get the latest around what’s happening with Block Bindings, be sure to check out this dedicated iteration issue for WordPress 6.7. As you’ll see, updates are shared there, along with a list of planned tasks. Stay tuned too on the WordPress Developer Blog for more tutorial that go along with the current ones, prior to the development of a UI: Introducing Block Bindings, part 1: Connecting custom fields and Introducing Block Bindings, part 2: Working with custom binding sources.
My offer remains to create more WordPress Playground instances to help more folks play with what’s new in WordPress and make it better before the next version lands. Happy WordPress-ing.
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