What are Custom Content Blocks on Substack?
Advanced layout features for Substack homepages
Custom Content Blocks are blocks of content you can add to your Substack publication’s homepage.
Warning: if you’re a WordPress nerd and thought this would give you unlimited customization options you’ll be disappointed. Custom content blocks cannot be used to display free text, images or html. They only support Substack-generated content such as post previews, CTAs, recommendation lists and the like.
There are four choices for the content block:
- A list of posts, with ‘custom sidebar options’ — see below
- A grid of posts with ‘custom sidebar options’
- Feature — which is a highlighted group of posts belonging to a section or tag
- A subscribe call to action
Custom sidebars are columns you can add to a list of post previews or a grid of post previews in your custom content blocks. If you choose to have a ‘sidebar’ your content block will contain a list or grid of posts and a column on the left or the right of the post previews.
The column contains one or more modules. Modules are: subscribe call to action, recommendations, links, contributors, newsletters, podcasts or top posts.