WordPress Gutenberg 11.5, introduced a week ago includes a new Widget Group Block that fixes several bugs and substantially improves the widget block editing experience.

The new feature, called the Widget Group Block, brings the true bug-free full site editing experience to the WordPress widget block area.

WordPress Widgets

WordPress Widgets are functionalities that are typically found in the side-bars and footer area of a typical web page.

The widget area can, for example, contain calendars, search bars, site navigation, and links to the latest posts.

Problems with Widget Editing

The WordPress Gutenberg project is in the middle of a four-phase rollout, phase 2 to be specific.

The goal for phase 2 is:

“Customization — Full Site editing, Block Patterns, Block Directory, Block based themes “

The statement above means that the “blocks” method of creating a website will extend to all areas of a website.

The widget area had problems however that needed solving.

A bug report was filed in June 2021 about problems with the widget editor.

“In the new Widgets Editor, I cannot recreate the structure of .c-widget > .c-widget__title in blocks unless you use “Legacy Widgets” block.

Therefore, it is not possible to place new widgets using this unified design in blocks.”

One of the problems was that it was not possible to add a heading to a widget area using the Gutenberg widget block editor.

For example, if you have a widget area for an archive, adding the title to it would not display the way it used to.

Adding a heading title to a widget worked fine under the old way of doing things.