Kadence Blocks vs TinyMCE Custom Styles

Kadence Blocks extends the WordPress block editor with powerful custom blocks and advanced design controls, helping you build fast, accessible, and professional websites, without writing code. Each block is built with performance, accessibility, and flexibility in mind, giving you the tools to create visually impressive layouts while maintaining clean, optimized output. Whether you’re building landing pages, blogs, or full websites, Kadence Blocks provides a streamlined, modern workflow that rivals traditional page builders, directly inside the native WordPress editor. Custom Blocks Include Accordion – Create beautiful accordions! Each panel can contain any other block and customized title styles, content background, and borders. Advanced Button – Create an advanced button or a row of buttons. Style each one, including hover controls. Plus, you can use an icon and display them side-by-side. Advanced Form – Our powerful form block allows you to easily create a contact or marketing form and style it within the block editor. Advanced Gallery – Create stunning photo galleries, carousels, and sliders! Customize links, captions, image sizes and more for optimal performance. Advanced Text – Create a heading or paragraph and define sizes for desktop, tablet and mobile along with font family, colors, etc. Use Inline AI editor to improve writing, fix spelling and grammar errors, change tone, etc. Countdown – Increase your conversions by adding a sense of urgency to your offering with a countdown. Pro includes evergreen campaigns as well. Count Up – Include an animated number counter to pages and posts. This can potentially add interest to what would otherwise be boring numbers on a screen. Info Box – Create an info box containing an icon or image and, optionally, a title, description, and learn more text. Style static and hover separately. Icon – Choose from over 1500+ SVG icons to add into your page and style the size, colors, background, border, etc. You can also add multiple icons side-by-side. Icon List – Add beautiful icons to your lists and make them more engaging and attract viewers’ attention. Over 1500 icons to choose from and unlimited styles. Lottie Animation – You can import lottie animations into your site. You can choose how the animation plays and control animation speeds, loops, etc. Posts – Display a clean grid of posts anywhere on your site, great for your homepage where you want to tease your blog. Progress Bar – Show progress visually, including how much of a goal has been met, satisfaction rates, and many other use cases. Row Layout – Create rows with nested blocks in columns or as a container. Give style to your rows with a background, overlay, padding, etc. Section – Design sections of content in Row Layout blocks. Add any block to the section and design it using block settings. Show More – Easily add previews to content with nested blocks of any type. Adjust preview size by device type, apply a fade out, customize advanced buttons, and more. Spacer / Divider – Easily create a divider and determine the space around it, or just create some space in your content. You can even define the height per screen size. Table of Contents – Quickly navigate to headings within your post or page by automatically creating anchor links and a smooth scroll. Tabs – Create custom vertical or horizontal tab layouts with advanced styling controls. Each tab content is an empty canvas able to contain any other blocks. Testimonials – Create confidence in your brand or product by showing off beautiful and unique testimonials. Display as a carousel or a grid. Video Tutorial Key Block Features Content & Layout Flexibility: Build complex layouts with nested rows, responsive controls, and advanced spacing options, all within the block editor. Design Library: Overcome creative blocks and assemble a site in no time. Our Design Library offers hundreds of pre-built patterns and pages tailored to your unique brand Intelligent Load: Kadence Blocks won’t slow down your website because it only loads CSS or Javascript when you need it- and only for the blocks you are using on a specific page. Responsive Controls: Tweak your design for each screen size. Edit tablet and mobile settings while previewing in WordPress editor. Typography Controls: Choose from 900+ Google fonts and design your site with complete typography control. Color & Background Controls: Gradients, overlays, parallax backgrounds, borders, etc. You can control all the design settings! Configurable Defaults: Make development a breeze. Once the default settings are defined, every time you add a block those settings will automatically be applied. Setting Visibility Controls: Hide block settings from certain user roles so they can focus on content and you can keep them out of the block designs. Spacing Controls: Control paddings and margins for your blocks in whatever units you like. Customize responsively for precision spacing and design. Connect With Our Community Naturally, the web creation process comes along with endless questions, creative ideas, and is ripe for collaborative opportunities. That’s where our thriving Facebook community, with over 12,000 members and counting, becomes an invaluable resource. Whether seeking answers to specific questions, looking for constructive feedback on your website, or eager to uncover innovative ways to leverage Kadence tools, our community is here to support and inspire you. Join the Web Creator Community Facebook Group. Subscribe to the Kadence WP newsletter for the latest updates and insights. Listen to our podcast, the Kadence Beat, where we explore web creation strategies together. Check out some tutorials by creators who love Kadence (and think you should, too 🙂): Kadence Blocks Tutorials by StartBlogging101 The Ultimate Kadence Guide for Beginners by CliftonWP Get More from Kadence WP Enhance your page building experience even more with these additional Pro Blocks: * Advanced Query Loop * Advanced Slider * Image Overlay * Modal * Post Grid/Carousel * Product Carousel * Repeater * Split Content * Video Popup * …and more! Get over creative blocks and engage your viewers further with these Premium Features: * Animate on Scroll * Custom Icons * Custom Fonts * Dynamic Content * Page Specific Scripts * 800+ Design Library patterns Power-up your WordPress site with the comprehensive Kadence WP suite: * Start with the Kadence Theme for a flexible, fast, and lightweight foundation. * Create personalized, professionally designed websites in minutes with pre-designed Starter Templates. * Seamlessly integrate powerful WooCommerce capabilities through ShopKit. * Upgrade your marketing strategy and boost revenue with Kadence Conversions. * Create a custom library of templates on Kadence Pattern Hub and commoditize your design talents. Each tool is designed to work in harmony, providing a full-suite solution for building, managing, and growing your online presence with ease. About the Kadence WP Team Hello! We are Kadence and we reside in the beautiful city of Missoula, Montana. We find ourselves every day grateful to live in the heart of Big Sky Country where the mountains are plentiful and the rivers run wild. If we’re not writing code or answering support, you can probably find us deep in the woods, exploring and getting lost. We believe that life is meant to be lived to the fullest and we do our best to make the most of every day. Please feel free to leave comments or questions through the contact form. We love hearing what you have to say. As a brand, we create clean and professional class WordPress tools that help everyday people create beautiful websites. Our name is simply a different spelling of the word “cadence” which means “a rhythmic flow of a sequence of sounds or words: the cadence of a language.” Source files github Support Need support? Our expert team is eager to assist you with any queries. Please reach out through our dedicated support form for prompt and helpful guidance. Security Policy Reporting Security Bugs Please report security bugs found in the Kadence Blocks plugin’s source code through the Patchstack Vulnerability Disclosure Program https://patchstack.com/database/vdp/kadence-blocks. The Patchstack team will assist you with verification, CVE assignment, and notify the developers of this plugin.

Please someone take over maintaining this plugin, or it will get abandoned – with over 9.000 active installations. I’m now 69 and although retired, all my time is taken up with other projects, while I still have the energy for them. Why you might want to take it over? It’s really useful: Make your editing experience as simple and good as possible by improving the way you work with the TinyMCE visual editor (including Gutenberg Classic block). This plugin adds custom CSS file(s) to the frontend and to the TinyMCE editor; and it allows you to populate TinyMCE’s ‘Formats’ dropdown with your own styles. The features in more detail: 1. Installs two CSS stylesheet files into your chosen location (so you can still do updates of the active theme and this plugin and even switch to another theme). In general you will need to fetch the auto-created stub files via FTP, edit them locally and upload them, overwriting the previous versions. editor-style.css is used for styling your TinyMCE Editor editor-style-shared.css is used for styles to be used by the frontend AND in your TinyMCE editor (so you do not have to copy) To use this feature, you have to write your own CSS code into these files. 2. The main feature of this Plugin is to offer a Backend-GUI to create custom styles for TinyMCE (‘Formats’ dropdown) dynamically. Easy to add, change and delete styles No editing of source code required (excepting the CSS stylesheets) Allows you to add block- and inline elements which are not provided by TinyMCE, e.g. , , etc. The plugin’s backend page contains a lot of description and some links to help you define your styles correctly Note that each style can have both CSS Classes and/or CSS Inline-Styles. The latter (excepting color) will even be applied to the Formats dropdown menu items. However, I do not recommend inline styles as they are inserted into the text of the post/page and remain unchanged if you later alter the style in the plugin settings – so in general stick to Classes! How the two stylesheets are applied The shared style sheet file is enqueued to be included on frontend pages (via the usual tag in the area) using the standard WordPress function wp_enqueue_style. So, as with most other stylesheets, the statements in it will automatically apply to the whole HTML page. So define class names which will not collide with any already in use by the theme – and do not define styles for HTML elements without a limiting class name unless you want them to apply to all elements of that tag type (including in header, footer, sidebar…). Both stylesheets are passed to TinyMCE by calling: add_filter(‘mce_css’, …) What this causes to happen is that they are linked in to the HTML document which is the source for an , which is the editing area of TinyMCE. So they should definitely only apply to HTML in the iframe – although I have heard that some situations, e.g. a cache plugin, may break this mechanism. Gutenberg classic blocks As of version 1.1.1 this plugin works for the Gutenberg classic block. WordPress MultiSite Although it does not check for MultiSite, the plugin works in the MultiSite environment, since WordPress uses a separate Options table for each MultiSite. You can reuse the same CSS files (by supplying the same custom directory in each Site), or add separate ones for each Site. Current Languages – en_US – de_DE (Tim Reeves) Background Information Then and Now This plugin was originally written by David Stöckl in 2013 – long before Gutenberg had been conceived, and at a time when several different plugins all tried to enhance the TinyMCE editor in different ways. It was abandoned a year later by David and I forked it in 2016, renamed to TinyMCE Custom Styles” (“TCS”). Most of those other TinyMCE-related plugins, notably WP Edit, are now abandoned; apart from this plugin, only TinyMCE Advanced, now also handling Gutenberg and renamed to Advanced Editor Tools (abbreviated hereafter to “AET”) seems to still be notably active in this area. AET is a great plugin – you can also check out its companion for developers Advanced TinyMCE Configuration. I use AET myself on most websites – but there are a few things it’s not designed to do, and that’s where this plugin fills the gap. You can consider it as AET’s sidekick 🙂 TinyMCE and the WordPress theme The goal is to configure the TinyMCE backend editor so that its ‘Visual’ tab displays content as closely as possible to how it will look on the content area of the actual website. To this end, WordPress has for years provided a feature which can be used by themes, called ‘editor styles’. This allows a theme to make known to WordPress one or more CSS files, which should contain a subset of the theme’s styles, those which apply to the display of content in the content area (i.e. excluding styles applying to headers, sidebars, footers, archives, comments, …). If the theme provides this feature, that CSS file (or files) are loaded to TinyMCE to achieve the goal. The default location is one file named ‘editor-style.css’ in the theme’s root directory. In fact, WordPress seems to find this file, if present, even if the theme does not register it. All good modern themes provide this feature. Advanced Editor Tools The really good plugin ‘Advanced Editor Tools’ (“AET”, from and maintained by Andrew Ozz, a WordPress core developer, now attributed to Automattic, the company effectively behind WordPress) helps with one of the problems noted above: It gives you complete freedom to select which buttons and dropdowns are displayed in TinyMCEs header – in particular you can just drag the ‘Formats’ dropdown into one of the bar areas, exactly where you want it. AET also has a number of other options, for example to prevent TinyMCE from removing tags and minifying the text in the ‘Text’ tab, which is very useful when you need to look at the HTML and do any manual adjustment. Shortcomings in the standard setup There are some regrettable weaknesses in the unenhanced situation: Any custom CSS which you set in the WordPress Customizer is not applied to TinyMCE (it is written out as direct styles in the of each website page). The styles which the theme provides for TinyMCE are applied to the HTML displayed by the editor. This is fine with fixed styling of elements like , or . But a theme may also include optional styles to change or enhance the display of an element – e.g. ‘.small’, ‘.screen-reader-text’, ‘.beforelist’, ‘.hilitebox’ and so on. In this case, and without help from any plugin, there is no way to select any of them from the menu or toolbar of TinyMCE in order to apply them to an element, so a user would need to know the style names and apply them manually in the ‘Text’ tab – not good. See below ‘importcss’, but note that it overwrites anything other plugins have put in the ‘Formats’ dropdown. In the standard configuration (i.e. without enhancer plugins) TinyMCE is not even configured to show the ‘Formats’ dropdown, which we need to apply custom styles to elements in the text. The TinyMCE Formats dropdown Internal name: ‘styleselect’. By default, this dropdown is not displayed. You can add code e.g. to your theme’s functions.php, to have it shown. Its default contents are 4 entries with corresponding submenus: Headings, Inline, Blocks and Alignement. TCS always registers the ‘Formats’ dropdown to TinyMCE’s second toolbar, this does not seem to be a problem for AET. It is in this area that TCS is really usefull: It allows you to create named styles, so you can name them descriptively, e.g. to show if the style is a block or inline style, if it uses the Wrapper option, and so on. Basically you will be adding styles to the dropdown which are defined in a stylesheet from the theme, or in your ‘editor-style-shared.css’, to allow you (or your customer) convenient and understandable access to them while editing. The TinyMCE JavaScript plugin ‘importcss’ When the AET plugin is active, it offers an option “Create CSS classes menu” (subtitle: Load the CSS classes used in editor-style.css and replace the Formats menu). When checked, a TinyMCE JavaScript plugin called ‘importcss’ is loaded to the frontend, which parses the CSS loaded to TinyMCE (i.e. from your theme’s ‘editor styles’ and this plugins ‘editor-style.css’) and populates the ‘Formats’ dropdown with a selection of those styles. Styles applying directly to HTML elements without a class name are skipped. Styles applying to a tag and containing a class, e.g. “h1.page-title” will be included and work as expected. But for classes not limited to a tag, it has no way of knowing if the class is intended to be applied to a block element or as an inline element, nor to which tags it should apply or should use, so it simply offers them as inline elements, which may or may not be their intended use. Styles with a pseudo-class or pseudo-element (e.g. ‘:hover’, ‘::before’) will be omitted. The bottom line is, that however good the themes editor styles are, we end up with a sub-optimal population of the Formats dropdown: It will be too long (including many styles we don’t need or don’t understand), and some valuable styles will be missing or wrongly classified as inline styles. Given all these shortcomings, I have not found this feature to be of much use in practice. Credits This plugin is a fork of TinyMCE Advanced Professsional Formats and Styles which has been abandoned by the original author. Initially I just fixed a JavaScript bug so that it worked again, and cleaned up the code and messages a bit. Since then, a number of further improvements, see the changelog. I was born in 1954 and would be glad if someone else would now take over this plugin and further improve it. Translations are also very welcome. David Stöckl, Vienna, the original author. Many thanks! The plugin icon (Der Bitkönig) was drawn by Gabriele Meischner, muchas Gracias! Rawrly for providing security updates. Report Security Bugs Please report all security bugs found in this project by following the vulnerability disclosure process.