The last two releases of Block Visibility have been relatively minor, so I decided to bundle the announcements into a single post.

But before I get into the new features, I recently set up a Playground blueprint for Block Visibility. So, you can now test the plugin in your browser without actually having to install it. Click the button below to give it a try.

Without further adieu, here’s an overview of the noteworthy changes. You can see the complete changelogs for 3.2.0 and 3.3.0 on GitHub.

Author controls

Recently, a few feature requests have been submitted about conditionally displaying a block if the user is the current post’s author. Perhaps an “Edit Post” link or some other informational block.

It might initially seem strange, but this functionality should live in the Location control, which provides visibility conditions based on the location of the block and any attributes associated with the current location.

In this case, we want to show a block if the current post has an author equal to the current user. You can think of the author as an “attribute” of the post, much like whether the post has a featured image.

This was an easy addition to the plugin, so you can now display a block if the current user is the author of the post or not.

ACF options pages

Another common request was for the Advanced Custom Fields (ACF) control to support options pages, which are available in the Pro version of ACF. This functionality allows you to assign fields to custom settings pages in the WordPress admin. You can think of these as “global” fields where the values are stored in the wp_options table.

Before version 3.3.0, the plugin only supported fields associated with the current post (post, page, etc.) or the current user. While I would not traditionally add functionality to Block Visibility specifically for a Pro feature of an integration, there are some compelling use cases.

Consider a scenario where you want to run a promotion that requires multiple CTAs throughout your site. You create a field called “Enable promotion” on an options page. Then, you configure each CTA block to become visible when enabled. When the promotion is over, hide the blocks by disabling the field.

This type of workflow is quite common, and Block Visibility includes Visibility Presets that can handle this functionality without needing ACF. But, if you are already an ACF user and have sites built out in this way, adding support for options pages was a no-brainer.

Here’s a look at how this works.

Next steps

As mentioned in previous posts, the continued development of Block Visibility will focus on improving current functionality and adding new features to existing controls. There are no new integrations on the horizon. The goal is to make each existing control as feature-rich as possible while ensuring the plugin feels like a native Core add-on.

If you find a bug or have a feature request, please submit a support ticket or create an issue on the Block Visibility GitHub repo. Pull requests are also always welcome. So if a feature you really want is taking too long for me to build, I encourage you to become a contributor!

Thanks for your interest in Block Visibility. Until next time. 👋