I was looking to improve the UI text for the "Make this block reusable" setting (in #2731), and was baffled by this bit in the help text:
A reusable block can never be converted back into a stand-alone block.
Now, I know what the differences between reusable vs stand-alone custom blocks are, so I fully understand the above, but why are we preventing making a single instance of a reusable block back into a stand-alone one? So for example:
- User edits existing reusable block in a layout.
- We have some help text to explain that a) this is an instance of a reusable block and b) making changes here will affect all instances (copies) of the same block, across any layout it may be being used in.
- We have a "Convert to stand-alone block" checkbox.
- We explain that converting the reusable block to stand-alone will "break its link" with the "source", and that it will then be possible to configure it independently.
- During validation, we check to see if the user has ticked that checkbox, and if so, we then save the same block properties (that are in config for the reusable block) into a "regular" content/stand-alone block.
- We finally update the config of the current layout, to replace the position/region of the instance of the previously-reusable block, with its new stand-alone "clone".
That should work right?
Recent comments
Thank you very much for your reply! I understood that I first need to create a VIEW. I had assumed that the settings were configured via the block because it’s already included in Backdrop...
Blog module questions
I second this-- I have a module in contrib now that I just marked as "deprecated", and I removed its sole alpha release (because a fix in Core made it obsolete). Just plain deleting the module...
Weekly Meetings July 23rd 2026
If there's some time left in the dev meeting - although it might rather be a topic for the PMC: We have nice documentation and procedures, how to provide projects in backdrop-contrib space...
Weekly Meetings July 23rd 2026