An Introduction to Using Global Blocks in Breakdance Builder
Adding a global block to Breakdance is super easy. They're used for repeatable content blocks to add customized elements to specific pages.
Justin Gluska
Updated April 23, 2023
global blocks breakdance builder
Reading Time: 3 minutes
When you're designing a website, you might not be using a template for every single page you build, but sometimes every single page needs an adaptable content block that you might want to easily add.
That's exactly what a global block does in Breakdance.
Newsletter signups, testimonials, and creative social media sharing buttons are all unique ways of customizing a global block.
Think of them as your own customized element that you can easily plop across different pages on your site. Edit once, use unlimited times.
Global blocks are used for static, replicable content (like placing a newsletter signup global block on every page) or can be applied to more complex things like repeatable/dynamic content like testimonials.
Rubin on YouTube made a great tutorial about using CPT in conjunction with Global Blocks to create a dynamic testimonial section on a page across his website. If you want to see that, check it out here. Great resource for the community!
Adding a Global Block in Breakdance Builder
To add a global block, go into your WordPress settings, Breakdance, Global Blocks, and click "Add Global Block." You'll have the chance to enter the name of the block and then you'll see the template name and shortcode.
You can easily add global blocks in the builder by adding a "Global Block" element then selecting the name, or simply by adding the shortcode to your page.
Once you've added a global block hover over the name and go ahead and edit it within the builder
You'll see the editor look exactly like it would for any page, template, or builder creation screen. This is normal. This is how it works!
You can further think of global blocks as "mini templates" if that makes it easier to visualize.
For this example, I added a section and threw in a heading and form builder. I'm building an easy waitlist signup for my site. This is so I can insert these on some of my pages (I only want to include them on a few service pages, so it wasn't worth including them in the main templates).
Ok, let's save this and hop into a sample page we'd like to throw this in.
Adding Global Blocks to Pages in Breakdance
Perfect! I've created a page with some sample content and then added a new element (called a global block) to the page.
Inside this block you'll see a single option: to change the block you want displayed.
If you open this dropdown you'll see all of your blocks in a single list. Select the one you want and you should see it populate on your page.
Boom, it's done. That's it. Nothing more.
Now remember you can't customize these on a per-page level, that's why they're global blocks. Any changes need to be made in the actual block page in Breakdance Global Block settings. But you could go ahead and start adding this to all the pages you want your customized waitlist signup (or anything block) to be.
We'll have a more complicated tutorial on how to dynamically integrate these within your site in a bit. Stay tuned for that!
Hope this helped! Leave a comment if you have any questions.
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