Hello, my name is Chrissy Ray, and in these lessons you will learn how to use reusable blocks, and how to use and create block patterns. Let's start off with reusable blocks. Let's say that you've got some content that you want to use multiple places in your website. There's a couple of ways that you can do it, but one of them is going to probably be the most efficient way to do it. So one way would be to select the content. So for example, I've got this frequently asked questions here, and you can just go through and select all the content. So I'm just going to select everything there. And then if I click on the options right there, I can then copy the block and paste it into another page. The problem with that is if I make the copy on my home page, for example, whatever I change in that copy isn't going to update the content that's on the frequently asked questions page. So the two copies are completely separated. They're not related to each other, and updating one doesn't change the other. But if instead I chose to create a reusable block, which I'm going to do, and you can see it's still here under the options, I'm going to give that reusable block a name of FAQ, click on save. And now if I make changes to the frequently asked questions to this reusable block, it's going to make changes to every instance of that reusable block throughout the website. Let me show you. So I'm in the frequently asked questions page. I'm going to click on update just to make sure all my changes are saved. And I'm going to go to my pages, and I'll go into the home page. And I'm going to add that reusable frequently asked questions block. There's a few ways that you can do it. Really cool thing you can do. You can see here, if I just click on this line where I can add a new block, you can see I can type slash FAQ, and that reusable block comes up. Another way to do it is to click on the plus sign here. And it should show up in the pop up. If not, you can click on browse all, and then look here under the reusable tab. And there is your frequently asked questions. You can just click on it there or drag it over. And you can see that added that frequently asked questions block that reusable block to my home page. Now, if I make a change to this instance of it. So for example, if I delete this sentence here that says, how do I get started? Or if I was to go through and change the colors of this text, so let's say that I wanted to make it orange instead to stand out. And I'm not going to do it for all of them. I'm just going to show you that this does change it. So I've just changed those two to orange instead of red. And you can see here, if I go to the update button in the top right corner, number one, the update button is showing me there's a little dot next to it. So what that tells me is that there's something more than just the page to be updated. And you can see when I click on update, then it asks me if I'm ready to save the page, not only the page, but also any reusable blocks that are on that page, because they've been changed. So if you don't want to save one of them, you don't have to, you can uncheck whichever one you want, and then you would just click on save. So remember, I changed the sentence here. I changed this. Do you have a beginner's guide? And I made these two orange. So let's see if that change went to my frequently asked questions page. So we'll go back to the pages, go back to the FAQ. And you can see it did it carry those changes over. So the changes that I made in the reusable block in the home page were reflected on the frequently asked questions page. So it did update them. So if I made any changes to the frequently asked questions in one, it updates every instance of that frequently asked questions throughout the site. Can you see how this might be useful? It's going to be really helpful. It's going to speed up your workflow if you find yourself using the same content multiple places in your website. So if I may change this to the frequently asked questions in here, then I would click on update, it would update it as well. Now, let's say that you have an instance that you don't want to automatically update. If you you added the frequently asked questions reusable block, and then you decided that you wanted it to have different questions, you like this layout, but you want different questions in there, you can take any instance that you've added to the reusable block, you can take any instance, you can see I've added this one here, I can click on the three dots, and you can see I can then convert to regular blocks. So that's going to take that out of that reusable block. And now if I click on update, it's only updating this particular copy. So you can see if I change this back to, let me change it to green this time. So you can see the difference, I'm going to make this one green as well, click on update, and it's only updating the copy that's in this particular page, because I disconnected it. So if I go to the home page now, you can see that this one still has the orange Q&A. So it didn't change this one. Now another thing you can do is you can manage the reusable blocks outside of the individual pages and posts. And by the way, you can add these reusable blocks to post as well as pages. And to do that, there's a few ways to get into it. One way is to select any instance of the reusable block, click on the options, and go to manage reusable blocks. And that's going to take you into the reusable blocks editor. Now this particular screen, this list of reusable blocks, some themes will actually add it to the menu for whatever reason, this particular theme that I'm using didn't do that. But usually it's going to be under the appearance menu. And then you would see reusable blocks under there, but it's not on this one for some reason. And you can see if I, if I click on FAQ or click on edit, that's going to take me into the editor for that particular block, I can make whatever changes I want to it. So if I wanted to change this back to red, like I had before, and let's make that one red, you can see when I click on update, it's only updating the reusable block. So if I go back out to my pages, when I go into the frequently asked questions page, it didn't change that one, because remember that one was disconnected, that one is just a block, it's not the reusable block anymore. But when I go to the home page, you can see that it did update that one. So now it's using the red instead of the other color that I had for that. Now another way to get into that reusable block editor is to add a new block. So I can click down here, click on the plus, click on browse all, go to the reusable tab, and then I can click on manage reusable blocks. One last thing that I want to show you is that you can use reusable blocks in different websites. So as long as another website has the same blocks, the same different types of blocks, you've installed the same plugins, the same theme and everything. So it has the same blocks available, you can export this frequently asked questions or whatever you name your reusable block. So you can export that as a JSON file, and you can see it's going to be FAQ dot J S O N. And then you can import that JSON file into another website. And it's going to import it as a reusable block, just like it is in here. So again, reusable blocks are super, super helpful. If you're if you're using the same content over and over and over again within your website, or even if you're using it more than once in a website, or in multiple websites, then it's really helpful. Just one thing to remember, if you're exporting and importing, it doesn't link it back to the original website. So if you make a change on one website, you've exported it, it doesn't automatically update any other website that you've imported it from. So I hope you found that useful. Thanks for watching and stay tuned for the next lesson where I will show you how to use block patterns.
