WordPress Blocks on widgets

Those of you who use the platform would be aware that they implemented blocks for creating new posts a few versions ago. It’s sort of like the way some themes used to work in the past, but now wordpress ships it by default.

So on its latest release, WordPress has now added block support for widgets. I’m not entirely sure why they did that, or what the benefit is in doing so, but I can tell you this, it crashed my wordpress site.

Whenever I would load the widgets area, it would simply show all the widget spaces with an hourglass type circle, hang, and hang, and hang, and eventually lock up my wordpress instance. In addition to crashing the admin page, it would take down my entire site with some database error of sorts. Apologies that I don’t have any screenshots as I don’t wish to crash my site right now.

In any case, I tried different themes and it was still happening, so I ruled out the theme as the culprit. I was looking for a way to disable the widget block functionality and found this plugin with kind of does the same thing as the “classic editor” does in disabling Gutenberg, except that it does it for the widgets area. The plugin is called “Classic Widgets,” the moment I installed it, my widgets worked fine and my site was back online.

If they fix it, I’d be glad to give it another go. I’ll keep an eye out for any bug fixes, but for now, I’m sticking to classic widgets. To be honest, a part of me feels like disabling gutenberg altogether. What are your thoughts on the direction wordpress has taken of late? Overall, I like it, but I don’t like that it breaks some of my stuff.