Broadside Blocks

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.