I’ve been going through the block options for eight WordPress collections (default Gutenberg, JetPack, Advanced Gutenberg, Atomic Blocks, Kadence, Qodeblock, Stackable, and Ultimate Addons) and I’ve already reviewed The three text blocks and the six media blocks. However, that “media” title was a bit misleading because there are two other areas I didn’t include in my “media” list.

File blocks

The default WordPress blocks include one called “File”, and it allows you an easy way to upload files of different types, store them in your media library, and add a DOWNLOAD button to your page so people can download it. I already have a Download Manager that does essentially the same thing but, of course, that requires a shortcode to show up in modern blocks. I use my Download Manager primarily for my HR guide, which is great as it keeps track of download stats too. If it wasn’t for the stats, I would ditch DLM’s overhead and just go with this block. The styling options here are pretty limited, but then again, so are the DLM ones since they don’t fit inside a normal block anymore.

I’ll stick to the DL Manager options and remove this one from the list. I’m tempted to leave it for temporary download options, but I’m trying to reduce overhead, so I’ll deprecate it for now.

Audio blocks

So this one is a bit awkward to work with in WordPress. I do some music reviews and I have a project that will require extensive playlists. But my default music manager these days is iTunes. I can embed a podcast player, I can embed Spotify or SoundCloud as a player, but there’s no Apple Music option. I took a chance on just pasting the link from Apple Music to see if the “auto” embed block would recognize it but it didn’t. I can still embed the iframe code from Apple Music but the height and width need adjustments. I was a bit disappointed though that I didn’t have options in the list to show my ratings of the songs.

For example, I did a review of all the top hits from 1943 to give my view of what songs were the “best of” for the year and which ones hold up almost a century later. There are 117 songs, and I would LOVE to be able to sort the list by different columns and link to the song with various services. But I considered just doing it in Apple Music and letting the playlist be my ordered list. Not as useful if I can’t show my rating of the song on a 1-5 scale. I thought Apple Music had that option, but I can’t seem to find it anymore if they do. The embed works fine, just not as powerful as I originally hoped. I will use it though for individual playlists when I talk about NAC outings, for example.

Regardless of how I do it in the end, though, it was clear that my embed options for Spotify, SoundCloud and the default audio player are not needed as I don’t use their services nor do I host audio files. There’s an option for a PodCast Player, but I don’t have an immediate need for that one either. I’ll keep that one as a future option, maybe, as I’d like to review some podcasts, but for now, I’ll deprecate it too.

Update: To see my current collection of blocks, check out the blocks I use.