What is the proposed way to update blocks?

[fabianpimminger]

I've been wondering how content should be updated on old posts after the block html-markup changes?

Without using dynamic blocks it is not possible to "re-render"/update all blocks, am I correct? What is the proposed way to update non-dynamic blocks when site owners want to change the markup of the content? Is there any way to do this without opening all old posts and re-saving them? Or should we just use dynamic blocks when markup could change in the future?

[youknowriad]

I'll reply with a question. Do you think it's ok to update old content on a website when a plugin gets updated without the user's consent? Don't you think if the content is published, the user doesn't want it to change unless he does explicitly?

I think most of the time, this is not an issue.

If you'd like to know more about deprecated blocks, see this page https://wordpress.org/gutenberg/handbook/block-api/deprecated-blocks/

And yes, in some small use-cases (remains to be seen for static blocks), you want to update the content in which case, it's probably better to use a dynamic block.

Thanks for opening the issue, I'm closing it right now. Let me know if I didn't answer your concerns.

[fabianpimminger]

Let me give a theoretical example. I'm developing a block for my own blog. I use divs and other current markup to achieve this. Then, a new html element emerges in a future standard and I want to update all instances of this block in all posts because it's a better fit. As I'm the developer of my own block, I know how it will affect my blog.

I think this will drive many developers to choose dynamic blocks and this won't be such a small use-case?

I just wanted to get a confirmation if dynamic blocks are the way to go if I want to have the possibility of updating all instances of one block. Thanks :)

[youknowriad]

Yes, dynamic blocks are the way to go in this case. But your use case is not so common. In general content creators are very different from block authors.

Enjoy Hacking

[katerlouis]

I am facing the same issue and absolutely agree with Fabian on this.

What if the frontend switches to a different carousel plugin, which requires new HTML structure for the galleries. From an editors perspective, the content isn't changing. From a devs perspective, quite a lot has to change.

Or what if you simply made a simple mistake in the blocks output and need to update it?

I mean, there must be a plan to deal with updating blocks, right? I don't even remotely see how updating blocks is an edge case.

When even the slightest changes in my block.js break the block in the editor, I'd really like to have frontend output with PHP hooks back :'(

Maybe I'm completely missing something here; please elaborate on what that is, because falling back to RichText or the HTML alone effectively makes complex blocks uneditable once the js code is updated.

[wturnerharris]

So I think we are encountering this very issue, and our only solve is to either have a stable block that will rarely change from a markup-perspective or build deprecations? As an agency we will be constantly iterating over blocks for clients as design needs change or as content structure evolves. To dismiss use-cases is to ignore the community.

I do agree that some way to hook into the output to upgrade a block, to make intelligent decisions on whether to output content based on emptiness would be useful, especially for rapid development and without destroying non-markup content.

There should be some way to manage the data layer. Furthermore, if there is a hook for the "Convert to Blocks" button, then we might be able to refactor on the spot without losing data.

[wpmark]

I also agree that this is a massive problem is the markup of a block cannot be changed without re-saving the posts that use the block. I have tried to add some doc on the dynamic blocks doc page here to explain that using dynamic blocks is the way to go here.

#8765

However, @tofumatt indicates this is not the way to go - therefore what is?

@youknowriad you mention

Do you think it's ok to update old content on a website when a plugin gets updated without the user's consent?

We are not talking about updating content - just markup.

[fabianpimminger]

@wpmark Good point, because @youknowriad said it is the way to go? I think this should be mentioned in the docs because it is an important factor to decide which type of block developers should use.

[youknowriad]

We are not talking about updating content - just markup.

How is that different from the technical perspective, if we allow people to change markup, they would be able to change content without the user's consent.

There is definitely some improvements we can make to the way we deal with those deprecated versions but dynamic blocks have their drawback:

• If you disable the plugin, there's no content anymore
• If for some reason the PHP filter is not executed (think about plugins exploiting the database), the content is there and it's semantically valid.

While I agree that it seems better devX wise, but for the user I'd argue that dynamic blocks are worse and Gutenberg should definitely not emphasize on those. Content blocks are better defined as static blocks for the user.

[fabianpimminger]

I've revisited Gutenberg yesterday (as the 5.0 release is near) and I still think that this is a fundamental problem of Gutenberg.

With the 5.0 release, there are still many blocks that are not 100% ready. The gallery block for example still doesn't solve all issues related to image sizes/responsiveness. As mentioned in #1450, blocks related to image handling will change after 5.0.

So if I update my most important posts after the 5.0 release to include some Gutenberg features (probably 25-50 out of ~100), I will have to manually update all posts again when 5.1 is released to get better support for image handling? And probably again when 5.2 is released?

Contrary to previous Wordpress updates, when image responsiveness (srcset attributes) just got added to ALL posts, this process seems overly cumbersome.

[jSanchoDev]

Correctly me if I'm wrong (b/c I'm new to Gutenberg), but if I develop a plugin with 20 or 30 blocks and release it, then rewrite blocks markup for version 1.0.1, then for 1.0.2, etc. - I'd have to copy/paste the save() / edit() methods code from each previous version? And keep them forever?

If this is the case, then what is the best strategy - to keep the markup always the same? Or to use dynamic blocks for all blocks? What if I have a large markup for block and have to remove some tiny part of it, or correct an error - do I have to keep all this in deprecation history? This may result in huge js bundle size for version 2.0.0 :)

Also, what is the proper way to handle this behavior while developing a block? Each markup change basically invalidates the saved version and you can only convert it to HTML.

[davidcrandall99]

If the blocks don't update dynamically, it kind of defeats the purpose of using them. I.e, if I change my theme, I may need the blocks to use different html in order to work cohesively with my theme. Otherwise, I'm forced to manually go through all posts and update every block individually.

Marrying the content to the UI is just bad content management. There's no reason that divs, columns, rows, etc., should be part of the SQL markup for the actual content.

Gutenberg has a lot of promise, but it's not a scalable solution for developers.

[roryashfordbentley]

Hypothetically, how would the following be possible:

I have a blog with 1000s of posts. Within most of these posts are multiple Button Blocks that look like this:

<div class="wp-block-button"><a class="wp-block-button__link" href="https://google.com">Link to Google</a></div>

The client has made a support request to add an icon to each button and we would like to change the button markup to the following:

<a class="my-button-class" href="https://google.com">Link to Google<img src="myicon.svg"</a>

Right now, how would it be possible to roll this update out to all existing posts? Would I need to update the Block component and then use something like WP-CLI to do a database find and replace for all existing instances of the button?