Block Level Locking

Availability

• Gutenberg Plugin v11.6 or greater
• WordPress 5.9

Overview

Theme/plugin developer can now manage when a block can be moved or deleted after being inserted. This applies to both core and custom blocks. This is done by registering the block with the new lock attribute. It's properties are move and remove that both accept boolean values with true representing locked and false representing unlocked. This attributes is added to all blocks with a default value of undefined

Dev Note

Examples:

Move and Remove locked.

This configuration does not allow the block to be moved or deleted from the block-editor.

"attributes":{
	"lock": {
		"type":"object",
		"default": {
			"move": true,
			"remove": true
		}
	}
}

Move and Remove unlocked

This configuration allows the block to to be moved or deleted from the block-editor. This is the default configuration.

"attributes":{
	"lock": {
		"type":"object",
		"default": {
			"move": false,
			"remove": false
		}
	}
}

Mix and match the settings

The settings can be configured as needed. This example allows moving the block but not deleting it.

"attributes":{
	"lock": {
		"type":"object",
		"default": {
			"move": false,
			"remove": true
		}
	}
}

Templates and InnerBlocks templateLock

This table shows the intersect of conditions between templateLock and lock

For removing:

lock.remove\templateLock	"all"	"insert"	false
true	can't Remove	can't Remove	can't Remove
false	can Remove	can Remove	can Remove
undefined	can't Remove	can't Remove	can Remove

For moving:

lock.move\templateLock	"all"	"insert"	false
true	can't Move	can't Move	can't Move
false	can Move	can Move	can Move
undefined	can't Move	can Move	can Move

Interacting with the lock attribute.

Because this is an attribute, it is possible to filter the values or change them via controls.

This repository contains the Feature: Block-level Locking block that provides an example of a block that is locked but can be changed via Sidebar controls.

There is also a filter in place to lock any instance of the List block so that is cannot be moved or deleted.

Development/Working with this repo.

You can download this repo as a .zip archive and install the plugin via the WordPress admin. If you want to experiment with the code, this repository may be forked and cloned to your local development environment. Once cloned. run npm install && npm run start.