Hi Reader,

WordPress 6.5 will ship with two critical features for professionals building websites for clients.

1. Partially synced patterns.
2. Meta field content for blocks

Let’s dive into these, what they allow you to do, and the possible use cases.

Partially synced patterns

Partially synced patterns let you change the content of individual blocks within a synced pattern. This allows some parts of the block pattern to sync while leaving others unchanged.

Let’s look at this example: a newsletter sign-up box.

You can now change the text of the paragraph and button blocks. While keeping the heading in sync.

Later, you decide to change the button color; this syncs to all patterns.

Partially synced patterns disconnect the content of the blocks from the rest of the pattern.

Therefore, this feature is also referred to as Synced Pattern Overrides. That is the technical implementation, though, as the content of blocks you designate is overridden.

Another term floating around is Content-Only Editing because this feature limits the per-instance editing to content only. I don't like this term, because it doesn't explain that this feature only works with patterns.

For me, though, the term partially synced patterns makes a lot more sense because these patterns are midway between unsynced and synced patterns.

Meta field content for blocks

This feature allows you to connect blocks to post meta fields. The meta field then provides the content of the block.

This is a screenshot from the WP Movies Demo site:

As of WordPress 6.5, this feature is in its very early stages. Only these blocks support the feature:

• Paragraph: content
• Heading: content
• Image: alt, URL, and title
• Button: URL, linkTarget, rel, text, URL

There’s also no interface to connect the field; it has to be done through the code view. There’s also no way to change the meta through the block displaying it.

In addition, this feature has yet to have a definitive name. Officially, this falls under the Custom Fields API for the block editor. That’s not a great name, though, because this covers way more than what is in 6.5.

But I’m still looking forward to this feature. The foundations for native post meta support in the block editor are now there. And this was a big gap that has existed for close to five years now.

The Block Bindings API: The essential addition

I didn’t just present these two features because they are part of WordPress 6.5. I also presented them together because they use the same API under the hood: the Block Bindings API.

As the name says, it allows “binding” or connecting data sources to blocks.

Next week, I will show how the Block Bindings API powers these two features.

Cheers,
Fränk