WordPress.com News
Ian Stewart
The WordPress Editor is a powerful tool that can help bring your design ideas to life but one of the best parts is, you don’t have to start from scratch. Building sophisticated designs can be as easy as picking Patterns from our growing library, and snapping them together to create beautiful-looking posts and pages. As of today, we’re now offering over 100 individual Patterns — with more being added all the time!
If you’ve never used Patterns before we’ve got an introduction to help you get started and also highlight some new features.
The best way to introduce Patterns is to use them. Here’s how you can add them to a post or a page on WordPress.com.
Here’s a quick demo that shows how to add an image gallery.
If you’re familiar with the Block Editor, the process will look similar. Once you’ve inserted a Pattern into a post or a page, you’ll be able to see how you can customize and edit the Pattern by clicking on different areas. The image below reveals the editing options that appear with our example.
Each Pattern is a collection of different blocks carefully put together to help you produce great looking blog posts and pages in the Editor. In the example above, it’s a collection of Image, Paragraph, Spacer, and Column Blocks. All pre-arranged into a simple but elegant Pattern for displaying images. Using Patterns in the Editor is kind of like having a WordPress web designer right there with you building up a design element by element.
The idea is that, once you’ve inserted a Pattern, you can start customizing it to make it yours.
For even more customization options with Patterns, try combining them with the updated fonts on WordPress.com.
This is where the number of Patterns gets exciting. Think of it like having over 100 templates you can add to your posts and pages. You can browse by category to see all the available Pattern options.
Taking a look at a few all together might be helpful. Here are some of my recent favorites.
They’re not favorites because they look great, but instead because these Patterns use so many different Blocks to produce a unique and useful design. Take the center Registration Form Pattern, for example. It combines a Heading Block, Paragraph Blocks, the Form Block, and the Columns Block into one Pattern that together, can make up an entire page.
We’re just getting started creating new Patterns for you. What type of Pattern would make it easier to create Posts and Pages on your site? More are on the way and we’d love to hear your ideas and feedback so we can make your publishing and site-building experience even better.
And if you have anything to share that you’ve made with a Pattern or with the Editor let us know! We’d love to see and hear how you’re using Patterns on WordPress.com.
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How about some patterns for crafters? I would be looking for patterns with fiber arts tools and materials.
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That sounds fun — fiber fun. 🙂 In the meantime, check out the Free Photo Library on WordPress.com. I can see some nice-looking textural images in there when I search for “fiber” that might be useful!
LikeLiked by 9 people
This looks like a great new addition to help make blog posts look really cool and professional!
LikeLiked by 11 people
Due to the pandemic, many teachers (myself included), especially from secondary schools and universities, are having to create virtual learning spaces overnight, so I wonder if we couldn’t have, in an emergency way, patterns aimed at the educational niche, facilitating this work?
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That sounds like a great idea, Thiago. Some of our “Contact” patterns might be helpful for communication and our “Text” patterns useful for creating engaging pages but we’d love to know more about the types of patterns that could be helpful for educators like yourself.
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As my blog grows, I’ll most def look into this. 🤗
LikeLiked by 9 people
This looks very great. 👍
LikeLiked by 6 people
Thanks, Ian. In fact many of the existing patterns can be easily adapted for educational use, but if some of them are already prepared it would make life easier for those who are learning to use the resources of a website (not my case, but it is the case of many). In addition, I would like to suggest a specific pattern for sharing links with class texts.
In a more advanced way, would help a lot if there was a block with the members of a private site, but in the style of the “My Community widget”, and it could be inserted in a page with a specific pattern for classrooms or members of a course.
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If you’re going to have blocks, then patterns really makes a lot of sense.
LikeLiked by 9 people
These new patterns look great! Any plans for creating patterns for food bloggers and/or recipes?
LikeLiked by 8 people
We’re glad you like them! Patterns for food bloggers is a great idea. We’ll see what we can … cook up.
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Cool! Thanks so much Ian! Sounds great!
LikeLiked by 7 people
I’d like a pattern to be able to do a description list so I don’t have to use HTML (dl, dd, dt) or customize my block paragraphs (indentation + optional bold or header) every time.
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This sounds amazing and I am in the process of writing my first post using patterns. A pattern block making it easier to put clickable contents into an article (in a side box with body text to the right) would be really useful for longform posts such as travel guides. I’m writing a guide right now (so many open tabs on my laptop haha) and would love it to look beautiful. I’m currently linking to sections of posts using html which takes ages with a very long article, and it doesn’t produce such a beautiful result as one of these patterns could.
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Patterns for book bloggers would be very welcome. 😀
LikeLiked by 9 people
These patterns looks very interesting. I will consider them at my next expansion.
LikeLiked by 7 people
Thanks. That’s quite the list! Nice curating!
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Thank you so much for these! I used to do this by HTML but these admittedly looks much better and easier for us to implement, too. Excited to use them on my next posts. 🙂
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