WBcom Essential

The Essential Companion for Your WordPress Theme

32 production-grade Gutenberg V2 blocks. 43 Elementor widgets. 5 BuddyPress blocks. A free plugin that makes Theme Reign, BuddyX, and BuddyX Pro even more powerful.

Overview

WBcom Essential provides production-ready blocks and widgets that inherit your theme's colors automatically. Built by the team behind BuddyX and Theme Reign, it's designed to work seamlessly with our themes—but works beautifully on any WordPress site.

Key Features

• 32 Gutenberg V2 Blocks - Rebuilt from a shared infrastructure to a competitive-audit quality standard
• 43 Elementor Widgets - Same features in Elementor widget format
• 5 BuddyPress Blocks - Built specifically for community sites (activity, members, groups)
• 4 WooCommerce Blocks + 2 EDD Blocks - Conditional, loaded only when plugins are active
• Responsive 3-Breakpoint - Desktop/Tablet/Mobile controls on every block
• Theme Colors Toggle - Blocks inherit your theme's color scheme automatically
• Accessibility Built-in - ARIA, keyboard navigation, prefers-reduced-motion
• Conditional Loading - Only loads assets when needed
• RTL Support - Full right-to-left language support
• FSE Compatible - Works with Full Site Editing

Requirements

Optional

• Elementor 3.0+ (for Elementor widgets)
• BuddyPress 10.0+ (for BuddyPress blocks)
• WooCommerce 7.0+ (for WooCommerce blocks)
• bbPress 2.6+ (for Forums blocks)

Installation

From WordPress Admin

1. Go to Plugins → Add New
2. Search for "WBcom Essential"
3. Click Install Now then Activate

Manual Installation

1. Download the plugin from wbcomdesigns.com
2. Go to Plugins → Add New → Upload Plugin
3. Choose the downloaded ZIP file
4. Click Install Now then Activate

Via WP-CLI

wp plugin install wbcom-essential --activate

Block Categories

All 32 V2 blocks are organized into 7 categories:

Theme Compatibility

Optimized For

• Theme Reign - Full color integration and matched component designs
• BuddyX - Free theme from WordPress.org
• BuddyX Pro - Premium version with additional features

Universal Compatibility

Works with any properly coded WordPress theme. The Theme Colors feature adapts to themes that use CSS custom properties.

Documentation

• User Documentation: docs.wbcomdesigns.com
• Developer Documentation: See docs/ folder
• Architecture Reference: See docs/architecture/PLUGIN_ARCHITECTURE.md

Development

Build Commands

Do NOT run npm run build or wp-scripts build directly. This plugin uses custom Node scripts driven by scripts/build-blocks.js. The default wp-scripts entry is ./src, which doesn't exist in this repo — block sources live in plugins/gutenberg/src/blocks/.

# Install dependencies (first time only)
npm install

# --- Block build ---
npm run build:blocks     # Production build of all 32 V2 blocks
npm run dev:blocks       # Watch mode for development
npm run clean:blocks     # Remove build/blocks/

# --- Distribution zip ---
# Builds blocks, then runs grunt to assemble a clean plugin zip in dist/
# excluding /docs, /marketing, /plan, /scripts, /node_modules, *.md,
# composer/grunt/phpcs/phpstan/phpunit tooling, and block source files.
npm run dist             # dist/wbcom-essential-<version>.zip
npm run release          # Same as dist, but also regenerates .pot/i18n

# --- i18n only ---
npm run i18n             # checktextdomain + makepot

After running npm run dist, the releasable zip is at:

dist/wbcom-essential-<pluginVersion>.zip

where <pluginVersion> is set in gruntfile.js (keep it in sync with loader.php and readme.txt when releasing).

Directory Structure

wbcom-essential/
├── admin/                      # Admin panel functionality
├── build/                      # Compiled block assets
├── includes/                   # Core plugin functionality
├── plugins/
│   ├── elementor/              # Elementor integration (43 widgets)
│   └── gutenberg/              # Gutenberg V2 blocks (32 blocks)
│       ├── src/
│       │   ├── shared/         # Shared infrastructure (components, hooks, utils, tokens)
│       │   └── blocks/         # 32 V2 block source files
│       ├── BlockRegistrar.php  # Auto-register from build/blocks/
│       └── gutenberg.php       # Loader, categories, REST routes
├── languages/                  # Translations
└── docs/                       # Documentation

Support

• Support Forums: wbcomdesigns.com/support
• Documentation: docs.wbcomdesigns.com
• GitHub Issues: Report bugs

Contributing

Contributions are welcome! Please read our contributing guidelines before submitting pull requests.

License

This plugin is licensed under the GPL-2.0+.

Credits

Built with care by Wbcom Designs - the team behind Theme Reign, BuddyX, and BuddyX Pro themes.

Version: 4.5.0 Requires WordPress: 6.0+ Requires PHP: 8.0+ Tested up to: WordPress 6.9