The plugin I share today has two extremes. It is the plugin with one of the longest name, “Block Editor: Reverse Columns on Mobile“, but the least amount of code. The PHP code only loads some JavaScript and CSS. All in all, it has some 250 lines of code combined.
I use it on one site that tries to use “no code”. The content and design is almost exclusively build with the Site and Block Editor.
What does the plugin do?
As the name says: it reverses columns on mobile. Let’s imagine you have a page with multiple “Media & Text” block. For a nice layout, you place the image on the left for the first one, on the right for the next one, then again on the left and to on. If you now view the page one mobile, by default, those blocks would always place the left column above the right one. So you would end up with something like this: image, text, text, image, image, text, text, image, …
This doesn’t really look nice on mobile. Instead, you probably want to have the image always above the text or always below the text. You could fix this by manually adding a custom CSS class to every other block and then use some custom CSS in your theme (or the Site Editor global styles), or, you can simply use this plugin, that adds a checkbox to the core/columns, core/group (flex layouts), and core/media-text block.
Why do I use the plugin
As mentioned earlier, I do use it on a site that tries not to use custom plugin and/or theme code. It should also allow anyone editing the content to easily use this functionality. For my personal blog and websites, I would probably just introduce a custom CSS class that I would add to such blocks. But why always “reinvent the wheel”, when there is a plugin that just does what it’s supposed to do, and nothing more. The CSS even takes care of RTL (right to left) languages/designs and different ways to arrange elements next to each other. I would probably miss some of those cases in my own custom CSS class.
Conclusion
Even though some people argue that having fewer plugins is better, I really like plugins like this one, that solves one thing the exact way, I would have implemented it myself.
Have you also found a plugin that improves small things in the Block or Site Editor? Then please share them in a comment with us.