Cross-Page Block Duplication

[vblazenka]

The problem

I keep running into this with clients - they want to reuse the same blocks across different pages, but every time they add a block to a new page, they have to fill everything out again from scratch. It's pretty tedious, especially when they're creating lots of similar pages.

Right now I handle this by coding up common blocks ahead of time, but clients still end up doing a lot of repetitive data entry.

What I'm thinking

Could we extend the existing duplicate feature to work across pages? So instead of just duplicating within the same page, you could grab a block that's already set up on another page and copy it over with all the data intact.

Real example

Say a client has their gallery with images and texts all set up - custom text, background image, button styling, the works. When they're making a new page, they want to start with that same gallery setup and maybe just tweak the copy. Right now they have to rebuild the whole thing.

Questions

Is this something that would fit with how Payload works under the hood?

I'm wondering about things like:

• Any issues with references between pages?
• Where would this fit in the UI - maybe a "copy from..." option in the block dropdown?
• Are there any gotchas I'm not thinking of?

Happy to help

I'd love to take a crack at building this if it makes sense for the project. Where would be a good place to start digging into the code? Any particular files or patterns I should look at first?

Cheers for all the great work on Payload! 💪

[bratvanov]

This is a highly requested feature in Payload, with similar requests in issues like #2977 and #10703.

The good news is that a PR implementing this functionality already exists: #11513. It's currently pending merge and release.

[vblazenka]

@bratvanov Thanks for letting me know. 🙏 I pinged the author in the mentioned MR, I hope that we can move this forward. 😄