Gutenberg: How to deal with functionality like in "Secondary Title" plugin

[ghost]

Issue Overview

Making intense use of the secondary title plugin, we are wondering how that kind of functionality will be supported in Gutenberg.

Is this in scope of the backwards compatibility efforts in Gutenberg, as it is obviously not a meta box?

How can this be implemented in Gutenberg?

PS.
I get that there is a workaround by creating a block mapped to a custom field, but that would require user action to add it, and would appear in the wrong place.

[danielbachhuber]

Related #4151

Is this in scope of the backwards compatibility efforts in Gutenberg, as it is obviously not a meta box?

Not sure, to be honest. I'd _think_ it'd be out of scope but I also don't know that it's impossible to provide compatibility for.

How can this be implemented in Gutenberg?

Conceptually, it seems like it should be able to map a block to a fixed location in Gutenberg.

[mellis32]

This and other custom field plugins are my main gripe with gutenberg. I wish this can be addressed so we don't loose native UI support for all of these custom field plugins.

[benhuson]

@danielbachhuber Also note that defined a fixed, required block using a template for a post type at the moment will not automatically add that block placeholder to existing posts. See #4476

[designsimply]

Noting the link for the plugin mentioned for reference: https://wordpress.org/plugins/secondary-title/

Now that Gutenberg has a subheading block and https://github.com/WordPress/gutenberg/issues/4476 has been fixed, do you still need answers here? If yes, could we work together to make the issue title more actionable and relevant and could you describe in a bit more detail inside this issue about what functionality you're requesting? Once we have more detail, we can reopen the issue.

[ghost]

@designsimply Thanks, personally i am fine with closing this issue, as i am no longer involved in Wordpress and Gutenberg. So just a few thoughts:

• the subheading block is part of the content and describes itself as 'Smaller than a headline, bigger than basic text.' That's fine, but not what we want here.
• whereas a secondary title is not part of the content but attached to the title itself.
• it appears above/below/beneath the title not only in the post's full view, but also in archives and widgets like 'recent posts', and in custom templates like a magazine's home page.
• so from a plugin authors point of view, there is a need to add something (a text control) above or below the title. (The same spot as on the front end for good UX).
• and the need to grab the value in a simple way (meta attribute?) without parsing the whole content for a subhead block.

As i am not at all up-to-date with Gutenberg's extensibility right now, this may allready be possible.