A decision to hide the Classic block from the WordPress block inserter has been walked back before it ever reached a stable release. The reversal, announced on Make WP Core, means WordPress 7.1 will ship with no change to how the Classic block — the TinyMCE-powered legacy editor block — behaves for users or developers.
The original proposal, announced earlier in June, would have removed core/freeform (the Classic block’s internal identifier) from the inserter by default. That plan introduced a new filter and a companion plugin called Enable Classic Block for sites that still needed it. Both have been dropped.
The announcement outlines exactly what changes — and what does not — as a result of the reversal. The key points break down clearly across the affected components:
| Component | Outcome |
|---|---|
| Classic block in the inserter | Remains visible and available by default |
wp_classic_block_supports_inserter filter |
Removed — never shipped, no migration needed |
| Block-level deprecation notice | Removed — “Convert to blocks” toolbar action returns |
| Enable Classic Block plugin | Will be closed — safe to deactivate and delete |
For anyone who installed the Enable Classic Block plugin in anticipation of the original change, the plugin can be safely deactivated and removed — no data or content is affected by doing so.
Hiding the block from the inserter made the editing experience worse without delivering a meaningful technical benefit — specifically, it would not have prevented TinyMCE (the legacy rich-text editor library that powers the Classic block) from loading. The conclusion was that pushing users away from the Classic block by restricting access is the wrong approach. The core team’s stated position: the Classic block should become obsolete by choice, not by force.
The effort now shifts toward making the transition away from the Classic block genuinely appealing. That includes improving the Convert to Blocks tool, which currently has known inconsistencies, and building better mass-migration mechanisms so sites can move legacy content into native blocks reliably. Work on TinyMCE itself continues too — the goal is to allow it to load on demand or asynchronously rather than as a blanket dependency, and eventually to skip loading it entirely when the Classic block has been disabled through the block manager.
