Nesting A Quote Block Is More Difficult Than You Might Think

Earlier this month, I wondered why I couldn’t transform a couple of paragraph and list blocks into a quote block and I referenced how easy this task was in the Classic Editor. Well, I received an email from Anne McCarthy, who is part of the developer relations team at Automattic.

They informed me that the reason I couldn’t accomplish this task in the block editor is that the quote block does not support nested blocks. In fact, this has been an issue since 2019 but it has proven difficult for developers to solve. Because of this, the transform tool does not have the ability to convert anything other than paragraph blocks into quote blocks. This is also being worked on with a late push to try to get the pull request merged in.

Unlike the Classic Editor that just wraps a Quote tag around text and calls it a day, nested blocks are difficult with a lot of moving pieces involved. So on the surface, what I perceive to be a simple problem with how things work in the editor is actually quite complex.

Thank you Anne for reaching out and pointing to these issues and pull requests as it helped fill in the blanks as to why a simple task is actually complex. Here’s hoping the developers can figure it out because limiting quote blocks to be nested with only paragraph blocks is a severe limitation of its use.