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The WP Minute brings you news about WordPress in under 5 minutes -- every week! Follow The WP Minute for the WordPress headlines before you get lost in the headlines. Hosted by Matt Medeiros, host of The Matt Report podcast.
Eric Karkovack (00:00)
Hi everyone, and welcome to the WP Minute. I'm Eric Karkovack. Today's episode features a segment from our July 2026 member meetup. WooCommerce developer advocate Brian Coords joined us to discuss what's new with the e-commerce platform. Brian demonstrated upcoming features and explained why Woo is focusing on fixing longstanding bugs. Now you can catch the entire discussion over on our WP Minute Plus channel.
Visit the WPminute.com for all the details.
Eric Karkovack (00:33)
I know you you have some experimental features and and things like that maybe you might want to show us.
Brian Coords (00:39)
Yeah, I can pull open. I have a little demo store.
Okay, I have a couple demo stores because I have I have I have a lot of Woo demo stores to try things out. This one, I'm gonna show the front end real quick. This is a a demo store of Woo. It's got fake products, it's got our design team actually like helped like come up with a bunch of fake products. It looks like an apparel store. and it's this one right here is running our upcoming block theme.
So one of the things about WooCommerce is most of the work is going into blocks and block theming. And we don't actually have like a recommended block theme for WooCommerce. If you go on, you know, the marketplace and look for themes, there's some block themes there from other people. but otherwise we have storefront, the theme that's existed for like a decade, I think. And it's yeah, classic, classic. So this one is a block theme, which is in its finishing touches right now. But what's really nice about it is as
Because all the stuff is in WooCommerce, the theme itself is pretty minimal. And so it doesn't have to actually do a lot. It doesn't have to bring a bunch of settings screens and like stuff. Everything's in the block editor. and you don't even have to use it. I actually use Ollie a lot of times for my personal Woo stuff that I'm setting up. but it's got all the things that you kind of expect from like a modern Woo store. You have like the slide-in mini cart on the side, you get the nice drop down for logged in users to like manage all of their settings.
You get the nice fancy filters that you can basically change things like change the price, change the color, and filter down products, and it does it live without reloading the whole screen. So it's got a lot of that stuff and inside of single product pages. It's kind of just really lightweight, but it's got, you know, nice tabs for switching the different types of product that you're looking for. things like when you click add to cart, it just happens. You don't have to reload, it just adds to your cart.
And shows your cart on the side of the screen, like all this sort of stuff. And this is all possible because it's all block based and because it's just running WooCore. A lot of people in the past were using an extension for a mini cart and an extension for this. And so a lot of these basic, just like customer pathways are trying to be resolved here all the way up to like our block-based cart and checkout, which I know are a little con some people like them, some people don't. they're really
They convert really well. They're really streamlined. They they're really performant. but if you're doing something really crazy with WooCommerce, then it might not have the extensibility and you might be using the old short codes, which in WooCommerce you can always use the old short codes, you can always use the old approach for anything. but I'm really excited for this block theme because I'm just like I feel like people constantly are building things that we already offer in the blocks, like product carousels and product.
galleries and light boxes and all this stuff. And it's like it's already there. We have the blocks. You don't need like to add a plugin. You don't need to add elementor. You don't need to add all these other things. And so I'm excited about the block theme just as like a way to showcase to everybody like you can do this and then you can just open it in the site editor and tweak it as much as you want, match your design, all that sort of stuff.