Locking Blocks to Prevent User Changes - Lesson

[wparasae]

IMPORTANT

This lesson plan belongs to part of a greater course, Extend a Low Code Block Theme which depends on the completion of Create a Custom Block Theme #1

Please reach out to @jonathanbossenger (Jonathan Bossenger) in the #training team Slack if you would like to help with this lesson plan.

Topic Description

This teaches people how to lock blocks in a block theme, and prevent other users from unlocking locked blocks

Objectives

After completing this lesson, participants will be able to:

• Lock specific blocks in place
• Disable the ability to unlock blocks on a per-user basis

Guidelines

Review the [team guidelines] (https://make.wordpress.org/training/handbook/guidelines/)

Development Checklist:

• Review any related material on Learn
• Description and Objectives finalized
• Gather links to Support, other learn.wordpress.org existing resources, and Developer Docs
• Create an outline of the example lesson walk-through
• Draft lesson plan
• Copy edit
• Style guide review
• Instructional Review
• Final review
• Publish
• Announce to the Training team
• Announce to lesson plan creator
• Announce to marketing
• Gather feedback from lesson plan users about the quality

Repo Structure and Lesson Plan Template

Please remove all blockquote comments such as this before publishing.

Description

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• Users / Content Writers
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• Beginner-Level Developers
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• Skill 1
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• Experience with HTML and CSS
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• Question 1
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• Do you want to makes changes to your theme yourself?
• Do you know how to write CSS?

Slides

If someone wanted to run this lesson as a stand-alone Online Live Workshop or at an in-person WordCamp, you could create slides for this here; if you run a Live Online Workshop on one of these topics or find someone else has, related slides would be welcome!

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• A local install of WordPress
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Assessment

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There should be one assessment item (or more) for each objective listed above. Each assessment item should support an objective; there should be none that don't.

Write out the question.

1. Option
2. Option
3. Option
4. Option

Answer: 3. Correct answer

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[jonathanbossenger]

@wparasae after doing the research and prep for the block locking for beginners workshop, I discovered the following:

1. The purpose of block locking is to make it so that anyone editing the theme on another WordPress install (ie client site) can't move or remove the locked blocks when editing the theme in the Site Editor.
2. In order to edit the theme in the site editor, you need to be an administrator user, or a custom user role, which has the install_themes capability (or similar).
3. This same user type will be able to unlock the blocks in the UI (this is just how it works currently) so the way to prevent this is to use some custom PHP code in your functions.php (details here on using canLockBlocks).
4. If we think about it, this makes sense, because if we made it a setting in the UI somewhere, someone could just disable the setting. So requiring it to be set at the code level means only someone with access to the code, and knowing what they are doing, would be able to disable it.

Given all this, I'm wondering if it makes sense to keep this in your low-code course, or move it to the Extend a Block Theme course?

[wparasae]

Given all this, I'm wondering if it makes sense to keep this in your low-code course, or move it to the Extend a Block Theme course?

Yes, we should definitely move this. Thank you for diving so deeply into this! You're welcome to link to this in your course, and I will remove it from mine when I do my course overhaul. :)

[jonathanbossenger]

Thank you for diving so deeply into this!

My pleasure!

You're welcome to link to this in your course, and I will remove it from mine when I do my course overhaul. :)

Awesome, I've linked this issue up to my course overview issue, so feel free to assign it to me when you overhaul your course.

[jonathanbossenger]

Workshop on block locking https://wordpress.tv/2022/09/12/lets-code-a-beginners-guide-to-block-locking-in-block-themes/

[courtneyr-dev]

This is a duplicate of #739 in its purpose. Can we close this one @wparasae ?

[jonathanbossenger]

@courtneyr-dev this lesson forms part of a course and is being used to track the development status of that course. So if we could please leave this open until this lesson in that course is ready to be created, thanks.

[ryanwelcher]

I'll be working on this :)

[jonathanbossenger]

@justintadlock, just confirming you're taking over this lesson as well?

[justintadlock]

@justintadlock, just confirming you're taking over this lesson as well?

Yes, I am handling this one too.

Edit: I'm hoping to have a draft of this lesson up today here: https://github.com/justintadlock/block-theme-course/tree/main/module-09

[justintadlock]

Draft is up now: https://github.com/justintadlock/block-theme-course/blob/main/module-09/02-Locking-Blocks-to-Prevent-User-Changes.md

Still needs copyediting.

[jonathanbossenger]

@justintadlock had a quick read-through, and everything looks great.

I have one request for this lesson, would it be possible to add a short section about using the canLockBlocks setting to disable the feature globally or conditionally?

Details here https://make.wordpress.org/core/2022/05/05/block-locking-settings-in-wordpress-6-0/

[justintadlock]

@jonathanbossenger - Just catching up with your last reply. It was my understanding based on the conversation above that we did not want to dive into filtering user permissions for this module. Maybe I'm mixing up which course this is supposed to go into. :) I did leave a note and link for further reading. I'm happy to add another section in, but I want to double-check to make sure.

It's also worth noting that the Theme Review Team does not allow this in themes in the official directory.

[jonathanbossenger]

@justintadlock aha, apologies, that conversation was when this module was part of Develop Your First Low-Code Block Theme course. After my research into that section, we discovered that it would make more sense in this "developer" focused guide to block themes.

It's also worth noting that the Theme Review Team does not allow this in themes in the official directory.

Hmm, that's interesting. I do understand why though because usually an admin would need to install the theme, and you don't want to be locking admins out accidentally.

I'll do a bit more digging into this, I think it's worth showing how locking blocks in themes can be effective to prevent users making changes to the theme, but to the best of my knowledge, only admins can edit themes anyway, so it ends up not making much sense to lock the blocks in a theme in the first place, unless I'm missing something.

Let's leave it for now, and I'll do a bit more research. We can always update the lesson as things change.

[justintadlock]

No problem. Just let me know if things change and you want me to fill in those bits too. Happy to do so!

[westnz]

Review:

A very practical lesson with helpful code snippets and advice.

This is the last lesson in the course. I suggest adding a conclusion and congratulating learners for completing the course etc.

[jonathanbossenger]

This is the last lesson in the course. I suggest adding a conclusion and congratulating learners for completing the course etc.

👍 done - https://learn.wordpress.org/lesson/congratulations-2/. Let me know if you think anything else could be added here.

[westnz]

Looks great!