Broadside Blocks
Editorial blocks for the Broadside newspaper theme — short-answer box, key takeaways, self-building table of contents, an FAQ that emits FAQPage schema, sources list, and the masthead furniture a broadsheet needs. By Shadow Software LLC.
by Shadow Software LLC · github.com/shadow-software/broadside-blocks-for-wordpress · website
Install
No release zip yet. The repository archive installs, but the folder name will carry the branch suffix and updates will not flow:
wp plugin install https://github.com/shadow-software/broadside-blocks-for-wordpress/archive/refs/heads/master.zip
Broadside Blocks
The editorial furniture a newspaper needs, as WordPress blocks.
A short-answer box, key takeaways, a table of contents that builds itself, an FAQ
that emits schema, a sources list — and the masthead a broadsheet is printed under.
📰 This plugin is one half of Broadside
The theme is the paper: the type, the grid, the colour, the templates. This plugin is what is printed on it — the nameplate, the folio rule, the bylines, and every editorial block.
They ship together and they are not much use apart. Activate the theme and WordPress 6.5+ offers this plugin automatically (
Requires Plugins: broadside-blocks).
Why is this a plugin and not part of the theme?
Because WordPress is right about this, and we found out the hard way — the theme was rejected from the WordPress.org directory for exactly this:
REQUIRED: The theme uses the
register_block_type()function…register_block_type()is plugin-territory functionality and must not be used in themes. Use a plugin instead.
The rule's test is a good one, and worth internalising rather than merely complying with:
Themes handle presentation. Plugins handle content. Anything a user loses when they switch themes belongs in a plugin.
A Short Answer, an FAQ, a Sources list — that is content. It lives in post_content.
Ship it inside a theme and changing theme silently blanks a reader's FAQ, with no way
to get it back. The rule exists to protect the user from precisely that.
What is in it
Editorial blocks — the furniture a reported feature actually needs:
| Block | What it does |
|---|---|
| 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. |
| 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 rel="sponsored nofollow", and which refuses to render without a disclosure line. |
Masthead furniture — nameplate, folio rule, utility bar, colophon, byline, author bio, editorial standards, newsletter panel, section grid, related stories, lead well.
Under another theme
Nothing renders, and nothing fatals.
Every block calls helpers that live in the theme, and every render callback passes through a single guard that checks the theme is there first. Without Broadside the blocks return empty, WordPress omits them, the page is whole, and an admin notice explains why. A plugin that white-screens a stranger's site when they switch themes is a bad plugin.
Licence
GPL-2.0-or-later. It bundles no third-party code, no images, no icons and no JavaScript libraries.
Also by Shadow Software
WordPress & WooCommerce
| Broadside | A broadsheet block theme for WordPress — blackletter masthead, folio rule, three-column lead grid. |
| Broadside Blocks | The editorial furniture that ships with it — short answer, takeaways, contents, FAQ schema, sources. |
| Crypto for WooCommerce | Free, self-custodial crypto payments — ETH, USDC, USDT & Bitcoin, confirmed on-chain. On WordPress.org → |
| AGT for WooCommerce | Sync your WooCommerce store with your American Gun Trader dealer listings. |
n8n
We run our automation on n8n, and publish the nodes we had to build for it:
| n8n-nodes-huggingface-space | Run inference on any Hugging Face Gradio Space from n8n — images, video, music, speech, text and moderation, with a curated model catalog and automatic fallbacks. |
| n8n-nodes-custom-exec-node | Brings back bash in n8n, which v2.0 removed. |
shadowsoftware.com · GPL-2.0-or-later · © 2026 Shadow Software LLC