The Block Editor Feature That Taught Me Why 'Nested' Doesn't Mean 'Better'
The Vision Was Beautiful
When we first implemented Twill's block editor for our client's editorial platform, I was genuinely excited. The concept was elegant: publishers could build rich, dynamic content by stacking blocks—text blocks, image blocks, quote blocks, video embeds—in whatever order told their story best.
But then we discovered something even more powerful buried in Twill's documentation: blocks could contain other blocks. Nested composition. The ability to create complex layouts by embedding blocks within blocks.
"This is it," I told my team during our planning session. "We'll give them the ultimate flexibility. Want a two-column layout with different content types in each column? Done. Need a tabbed interface with rich content in each tab? Easy. Complex hero sections with multiple content layers? No problem."
The client loved the demo. During our presentation, we built a sophisticated landing page in real-time: a hero block containing an image block and text block, followed by a features section block containing multiple feature blocks, each with their own nested image and text combinations. It looked professional, felt intuitive, and seemed infinitely extensible.
We launched with confidence, proud of the flexible content system we'd built.
Reality Had Other Plans
Three weeks post-launch, I got the call every developer dreads.
"The CMS is running really slowly," the client's content manager said. "Sometimes pages take forever to load, and occasionally they don't load at all."
I pulled up their latest blog post to investigate. What I saw made my stomach drop.
The post started with a "Full Width Hero" block. Inside that was a "Two Column Layout" block. The left column contained a "Card Stack" block, which contained three "Feature Card" blocks. Each Feature Card contained an "Image with Overlay" block, which itself contained a "Text with Background" block. The right column had a "Tabbed Content" block containing four tabs, each with a "Rich Content" block containing multiple "Pull Quote" blocks.
And that was just the header section.
Seven levels deep. The content tree looked like a Russian nesting doll designed by someone with commitment issues.
The Performance Nightmare
The technical reality hit me like a truck. Every nested block meant additional database queries. A block seven levels deep required multiple relationship lookups to render properly. What should have been a simple page load had become a cascade of database calls:
Query the main content block
Query each nested block's configuration
Query the media relationships for image blocks
Query the content relationships for text blocks
Repeat for each nesting level
A single "simple" blog post was generating over 200 database queries. Our carefully optimized Laravel application was choking on the data complexity we'd accidentally enabled.
But the performance issues were just the beginning.
The User Experience Disaster
The content managers were struggling too, but not in ways I'd anticipated. The nested block interface had become cognitively overwhelming. To edit a simple text element buried six levels deep, publishers had to:
Click into the main container block
Navigate to the correct nested section
Find the specific nested block
Click through multiple edit interfaces
Remember their location in the nesting hierarchy
Navigate back out without losing their changes
"I can't find anything," one content editor told me during a support call. "I spent twenty minutes yesterday trying to update a single headline because I couldn't remember which block it was nested inside."
The beautiful flexibility we'd created had become a labyrinthine nightmare. Publishers were creating simpler content not because they wanted to, but because the complex nested structures were too difficult to manage.
When Flexibility Becomes Fragility
The breaking point came when a content editor accidentally created an infinite loop. They'd nested a "Related Content" block inside a "Featured Articles" block, which pulled in an article that contained a "Related Content" block that referenced the original article.
The site crashed. Hard.
Our server ran out of memory trying to render the circular reference, and we spent an emergency weekend implementing safeguards against recursive block relationships. But the damage was done—both to our server uptime and our client's confidence.
The Lessons We Learned (The Hard Way)
1. Constraint Breeds Creativity
The most creative solutions often come from working within limitations, not from having unlimited options. When we limited nesting to three levels maximum, publishers started designing more thoughtful, purposeful content structures.
2. Performance Is a Feature
All the flexibility in the world doesn't matter if your CMS is too slow to use. We implemented aggressive query optimization and caching, but the better solution was preventing the performance problem in the first place.
3. User Experience Trumps Technical Capability
Just because your CMS can do something doesn't mean it should. The most powerful feature is meaningless if your users can't figure out how to use it effectively.
4. Documentation Isn't Training
We'd documented every possible nesting combination but hadn't trained users on when and why to use them. Power features need power user education.
The Solution That Actually Worked
We rebuilt the system with intentional constraints:
Maximum three nesting levels (enforced programmatically)
Predefined layout blocks for common complex structures
Visual hierarchy indicators showing nesting depth in the interface
Performance budgets that warned when blocks were getting too complex
Content templates for common page types
The result? Publishers were happier, pages loaded faster, and we still offered plenty of creative flexibility—just within reasonable bounds.
The Real Lesson
The most important thing I learned wasn't about Twill specifically, but about the nature of building tools for humans. Engineering elegance and user elegance aren't always the same thing.
Twill's block editor is genuinely powerful, and the ability to nest blocks is a useful feature. But like any powerful tool, it needs guardrails. The best CMS isn't the one that can do everything—it's the one that makes the right things easy and the wrong things hard.
Our clients didn't need infinite flexibility. They needed enough flexibility to tell their stories well, wrapped in an interface that stayed out of their way.
Sometimes the best feature you can build is the constraint that prevents someone from using your worst feature.
Building with Twill? Share your own "lessons learned the hard way" stories. The CMS development community grows stronger when we're honest about what doesn't work, not just what does.
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