Name: Building with WooCommerce Block Themes
Uploaded: 2026-09-30T18:19:29.380Z
Duration: 59 min 52 s
Description: Building with WooCommerce Block Themes

Transcript for "Building with WooCommerce Block Themes": Hello. How's it going? We are here today. We're gonna be discussing with about four okay. Let's try this again. We're discussing building with WooCommerce block themes. Thanks so much for joining us. It is midweek, so I think my brain is scattered a little bit, so apologies. But I'm excited. We have a few really great panelists today. We have Mike McAllister, who is, a theme theme guru. We also have Lucio Ginota, who, builds out a lot of the block themes that we have, and deals with our actual blocks as well as Carl Manyak. And they are both from automatic. And then, of course, we have Brian Kords, who is, my developer advocate in prime and not prime. I like to think we are, above board. But, yeah. So we're gonna get started today. We're gonna go through some q and a or at the end, and then we we have some predetermined questions that we're gonna ask, the panelists. And, if you have any questions, drop them in the chat. There's a little q and a section where you can ask the question. And, yeah, feel free to let us know what you think. So thanks so much. Cool. Thank you, Shani. I'm gonna bring everyone out. Just waiting on Mike. And I would just give everybody maybe you can just take, like, one second to just introduce yourself and kinda give us, like, where you're from. And, I'll start with, Lucio because you show up first on my grid, and we can kinda go around the corner. Alright. Yeah. Hello, everyone. I'm Lucio. I I'm a team lead here at, Automatic. I've been working on blocks since day one, so I kind of, breathe blocks blocks at this point. Very excited to be here. Yeah. We can take it from there. Nice. Go. Hey. I'm Carol. I'm from Poland, and I work in WooCommerce for four years now. And, yeah, I've been working on blogs, since I joined Automatic. And, I've been working on, product collection, product gallery blogs, and, some others too, so we can talk about that. Over to you, Mike. Thanks, Mike McAllister. I co found Ollie, which is a design library and editor toolkit. Like the others, I've been building with blocks for a long time now, since the beginning. Awesome. So I just wanna kinda set an introduction here. I'm really excited to talk about this for a number of reasons. I'm especially excited because my neighbor is getting a new roof, apparently, so I'm gonna get to listen to that in the background. But there's been a few kind of exciting things with blocks in WooCommerce recently. WooCommerce released its own block theme called purple, which is, a block theme specifically designed for ecommerce, but it's also very, like, flexible, almost like a blank slate. Mike, earlier this year, released a block theme for or some block designs on Holly specifically for ecommerce and got to kinda go through the experience of designing, like, a more opinionated layer on top of e of WooCommerce. And I think, I thought this would be a really good group to get together because I think, we can kind of see, a lot of value in just blocks. I used to work in an agency. We were migrating to block themes. It was not the easiest process, but once you sort of made it over the learning curve, it's kinda made everything simpler. It decreased a ton of plugins and dependencies. There's performance gains. There's all sorts of benefits to blocks. And what's nice is that the way that Woo is approaching it and WordPress generally is, all the power is inside of WooCommerce, and the theme is just sort of additional design layer. So instead of a theme and a page builder sitting on top of your WooCommerce store that now has all this extra compatibility, it's like all the blocks, all the all the, powerful stuff come straight from WooCommerce, and then you can have use our theme. You can use a theme like, Holly's, and you can kind of, like, layer on the style. So I kinda wanna talk about all of those different aspects of it, and I'll just pronounce that there is a q and a area. Should be, like, on the right hand side of your screen. So at any point, you can throw a question in there, and then we'll save maybe the last, like, ten or fifteen minutes for going through those questions. But just feel free to start sending them as soon as you have questions. And, also, there's a chat, so feel free to jump into the chat and just let us know, where you're coming from and just say hi to the chat. And, I'll try to pull out questions and comments from the chat as we go along. And so I'm gonna start with Mike, because I know Mike's been sort of at the front of woo of, like, block themes in general in WordPress, and I kinda wanted to see, you know, you have this Ollie, like, user base, this community of builders that are all using Ollie, which is a free block theme, and then also Ollie Pro, like, some premium stuff. But I'm kinda curious what made you kind of get into block themes versus, I don't know, building another page builder or something like that? And what are the kind of benefits that you're seeing for block themes generally for your users, people building with Ollie? Yeah. So for the longest time, like, I've been in WordPress for a very long time. I had a theme business, kind of the old traditional themes. And for the longest time, I just had a vision of, like, oh, if we could just have granular control over these content blocks and kind of build that way, that would be awesome. And then that's what happened with with block themes, essentially. And so, for us and for a lot of users, it just provides that level of granular design and ease of use that I think we've all wanted in WordPress for a long time. It comes with just so many other benefits. It's faster, it's lighter pages, performance wise, it's better. Yeah. For a lot of our users who are freelancers or agencies, they've gone through the same kind of path that everyone has where it's like it's it's a little tricky at first to kinda wrap your head around it because there are some new paradigms to to work through. But once you're on the other side, it's it's one of those situations where you're like, I can't go back to the other way now. So, yeah. There's there's there's just so many benefits. And, and then leaning into the ecommerce side, I think there's even there's just so much, more benefits to be found on that side too. Nice. And anybody who wants to follow-up on, like, what Mike's saying, feel free to just jump in. And otherwise, I will definitely call on you. But I'll give you the opportunity to jump in before I go to the next question. Yeah. So I think is great about, blocks is basically their customizability, that, you know, you can go to the editor and actually click the block and play around with it and see the preview, see how it's gonna look like on your page, rearrange stuff, change the layout. You know, before you had to use filters to inject some custom HTML. And, you know, as long as you can imagine what it's gonna be, good for you. But other than that, like, you need to actually apply it, see it on a page. And here you can play around with the stuff in the editor. And, honestly, I enjoy, you know, playing around with with blocks in editor and, simply see how crazy combinations I can achieve, you know, just by mixing them, nesting them in a weird way sometimes. And, you know, surprisingly, quite often, they work in a surprising way. You know, yeah, definitely, the editor is one of the greatest, things about blocks for me. I think if you look at the PRs on the WooCommerce, whenever we make a change to a block, it's always the in order to test them and stress test them, it's always the craziest combinations that we make. Sometimes engineers, they come up with stuff, that's really funny on the, like, how to mix and match blocks to see how, edge cases would work. And sometimes you see the funniest results But the same for users. I. mean, sometimes we get a bug reports, which says, hey. I made this and that, and I'm like, Yeah. I couldn't have imagined that, you know, that scenario. And, yeah. So there is a huge power in in blocks in their, flexibility. Yeah. There's one PR I've been following with, the mini cart, which is like a side sliding cart that's available in WooCommerce. That's the thing you used to have to pay for for a plugin, to get a mini cart, and now it's just built in. But, like, you just kinda have to, you know, be opted into this BlockVim ecosystem to see it. But, like, the bug the bug report was they wanted product upsells to show up in the mini cart. So if you have products in the mini cart, those upsells should be, like, dynamically linked to it. And that's kind of one of those benefits you're seeing, which is, like, maybe the default design isn't to do upsells in a mini cart, but that's a very common thing. And the previous, you know, workflows would have been filters and plugins and custom code snippets and hoping it all worked together. But now it's just something that happens and it happens dynamically on the front end. So, yeah, those PRs are definitely full of kind of, like, crazy ideas. But when we're building all of this stuff, there's sometimes, like, a trade off between making something super customizable but also making it easier for the end user. And so maybe thinking first from, like, the from, the woo side and, like, building the blocks, how do you think about how I mean, you could put in literally every CSS design thing ever into the sidebar of a block and it would probably get a little crazy. So how do you think about balancing, like, the ideal user giving them enough power to get something really special, but maybe, you know, not enough power where they're just gonna kinda have to go crazy or get confused by all these settings? How do you guys think about that? I'm I think there is, there's a quote from Matt from some years ago, which was something like, you you need to make, simple things easy and complex things possible or something like that. I'm paraphrasing here. I don't remember exactly. But that's the idea, I think. So the the idea here is that we want to make sure that people are able to, bring to life whatever their vision is, and I think purple actually comes out of that. It it was us being a little bit frustrated that, we would do exercises literally of trying to make a design into reality. Like, whatever design we had in mind, we we would meet up in person and would, like, have a challenge. And there was always something that was missing, in the past few years. And so then we decided to basically sit down and and make sure that we have a a fully fledged design that we can actually bring to life. Right? So that was the the ordering principle of how to, which controls to add. Right? Which controls to add was, can we can we bring this design to life fully without compromising? And so that was the idea. And then, I mean, to your to your deeper question, it is, like, a matter of discoverability of those controls and making them not confusing and that we work with designers, and every day, we, we brainstorm where to put those controls, how to, organize them. But also all the work that we've been doing on patterns, for example, the idea is that I think in in the blocks world, you wanna go in layers. And it's like if you want to have some customizability, you go to the patterns because they are kind of, like, opinionated, atoms that are made for you to work in in such a way that, you know, professional designers made them. We know they work. We know they convert. But then if you are if you are a power user or if you're an agency, you might want the finer control. So you go one layer deeper, and then you find those controls. And, so so you are not the the way we avoid the the people being completely lost into those controls is having those several different layers which you can go through before you get overwhelmed by the controls. And by the time you get to a deeper layer, then you are already familiar with with the rest of the control and the UI. And I think it's always a fine balance, of course, to find. That's also where I find a lot of the feedback from users and real people, including my friends actually, is super important for us. Yeah. And, Mike, you you kind of think about it from those other layers, like the overall theme design and, like, this global style settings and things like patterns and stuff. And so, like, how do you bring those things in? How do you bring, like, those kind of general WordPress principles in when you're thinking about, like, setting up a theme? Maybe it's a broad theme like Ollie that is meant for a lot of people or, like, a specific theme for an agency. Like, where do those things come in? Well, there's, you know and there's a there's a lot you can do just with general design work. Right? Like, some of the patterns that we include, for the WooCommerce, side of things in Ollie, they're just really nicely designed ecommerce patterns. And that means that, like, we've we've solved some of the design work for them. The user doesn't necessarily have to get in there and get really granular and really change like, that if they want to, they can because that's the beauty of Woks. But by kind of predesigning it, we're giving them a huge head start so that their job in the editor is so much easier. They're in there tweaking the little things that they need to tweak. And I think if you do that and you solve a lot of those those problems for them with just good old fashioned design, you are, on, like, the site level, with, like, a theme that's, like, opinionated and and kind of has a a a design and on, like, the pattern and block level. Like, there there's there's ways of of designing the pattern and then, like, block defaults that, like, dictates that they don't have to they don't have to to design so much. And I think that's, like, one of our overarching goals always with with Ollie is to, like, make beautiful design easy. Right? And we took that same approach with the the WooCommerce integration where it's like, okay. There's gonna be limitations, and there are there are way more, block settings now than there were when when we were doing it. But within those limitations, we just we we found ways of of bringing bringing the design to life and then sprinkling in little bits that we did need. Maybe it was adding a setting here or there. That's that's also part of our approach is that let's let core and and WooCommerce core do as much as possible for us. And then we just add really light, easy, maintainable layers, for us and for the user. Right? Because there's there is kind of two different levels of of kind of, control that that you need to think about when you're when you're a builder. Right? So we're we need to empower the the the freelancers and the agencies so that they can build powerful and beautiful experiences. But then that needs to deliver to whoever they hand it off to. Like, their end users, the the business owner. They need to be able to get in there and and edit what the the agency did. So there's when you when you kinda rely on the stack of WordPress and WooCommerce, you kind of get that beautiful, kinda graceful, cascading. And so I think, like, staying close to core and and kind of following generally good design principles helps solve a lot of that for us. I believe, purple was a great, exercise as well for us in a sense to that we spotted the gaps in blocks that we deliver, in terms of, what they allow us to customize. And, basically, we recognized those gaps, and one of the tasks in purple were to actually add those customization, to to the blocks. And, we mostly use the primitives from Gutenberg. So basically extending the, way to change, you know, simple stuff like paddings, margins, block gaps, typography, and whatnot. You know, there is always a trade off and a bit of a race when you develop blocks and how the Gutenberg evolves. And basically, other times some blocks were developed, the settings were not yet there. So there's always a catch up. And right now, I believe that, we invested a lot in catching up and basically making the blocks much more customizable so they can follow global styles. They get the settings exposed with usage of native Gutenberg controls. And to add to that really sorry. yeah. Let me put you up. Go ahead. Yeah. Sorry. Just to add to that, I would say not only we've been catching up with what Gutenberg has been up to, but in the past, I would say, maybe two years, we've been our focus has been much more, upstream oriented than it was before. So we realized, for example, with the previous blocks that we had, we kinda because when Gutenberg was young, you know, we kinda went our own way, as Gutenberg was forming its own philosophy and so on. And then we realized that, it was kind of a dead end, and we needed to restructure some of our blocks. But now we work a lot upstreams. We contribute to Gutenberg ourselves. And in do in doing so, we also contribute to to make an a road map for Gutenberg because world WooCommerce is one of the largest consumers of Gutenberg after all. So, yeah, I just wanted to add the the fact that it's not just the fact that we are catching up, but also that we have kind of turned our gaze, towards work upstream. And we think it's more future proof and more sustainable. And, also, I think that's how builders should do it eventually. Like, when they are it's it's just more future proof for their business if they are, building on top of the primitives that we are offering and the Gutenberg is offering instead of going their own way because that might cause small divergence that become wider and wider over the years. Yeah. There's two really good points in there, two really good lessons. One is Lucio was just saying, you know, with same thing with with Ollie. Some of the things that we're doing in there, we've instead of kind of wiring in our own way, which these days, it's so easy to do. I could just do anything anytime I want. We've taken to Slack and GitHub to try and get these changes pushed up, you know, like with some of the stuff we did with mobile menus, getting a free product out there that was able to be kind of morphed into into core. I could've just we could've just kept it in the plug in and not engaged, but the team was actually super receptive to that and we actually got movement on that really quick, which was awesome. And it took a little while to get going, but now that's available for every single WordPress site, every single WooCommerce site. You know, we've just unlocked this thing for for millions of of people. And, and one other thing that that Carol was saying I think was really important is, you know, getting in there and and building purple is when they started to to kind of expose some of the gaps and and see the real the the real things that needed to fix. That is just such great advice in WooCommerce and WordPress, but just generally good product advice. If you want to figure out where the gaps are, you can't just build it. You have to get in there and build with it and and pick a an ecommerce site that you like, get into WordPress, and try to build it. And if you can't and there's, like, obvious things that it can't do, then there's those things are considerations to be to be, fixed so that we can unlock those things. So I'm always advocating for people, when I see conversations happening in GitHub elsewhere to, like, spend just a few hours trying to build this layout that we're all talking about, and you'll see pretty quickly the the gaps that need to be fixed. Yeah. And I think, like, one of the things we've been talking about is there's WordPress and then the block editor and then WooCommerce, and that's, like, one kind of cohesive stack. But we know that the average WooCommerce store runs, like, something like 20 to 50 extensions on top of it. And so there's that there's the WordPress plugin ecosystem, then there's the WooCommerce extension ecosystem. And so I think one of the goals of the block editor is is sort of this idea of kind of, like, compatibility across your plugins and extensions. And so I'm kind of curious, for, like, the Wu team, just as you're building these blocks and in some cases, these are places like maybe add to cart buttons or product carousels and filters or some of these places where other plug ins are gonna wanna extend into it. And so, like, how are you thinking about how can we make this easy in our stack, but also, like, make sure that the plug ins and extensions can come along for the ride so that it's, like, one clear user experience at the end of the day? I. go? So okay. sorry? No. No. Go ahead. Yeah. I mean, extensibility is a important topic that we discuss, like, on every occasion when we actually start a new block. And, yeah, definitely, there's a, it is a huge topic. One thing that comes up often is, that the extensibility in a classic way is kinda no longer needed in a sense that, you know, in the past you needed filters. There were, like, before after filters. This is no longer needed in a sense that you should just inject, the block before or after, see how it looks like, rearrange stuff. You don't need to filter the HTML. So I mean, extensibility in that sense is a thing of classic things. We need to think about extensibility on different levels. Like for example, in a product collection block that we had, we wanted to actually allow people to create their their own collections to change the query product query, but keep all the capabilities of blocks preserved and get it out for free. We expose the way to register the custom collections. There are filters to filter the query itself, But, you know, you get the capabilities of of, blocks, just out there, for free. The same way, like, in the add to cart, the new add to cart blog, there is a way to to provide your own, product types and and change, change the way the the the add to cart displays for the different product type and this kind of stuff. So the extensibility, the definition changed a bit. But definitely, this is something that we need to keep thinking about and we do for our blogs. Yeah. I think I I think, there is philosophically, basically, two ways we need to think about this. In one in one sense, we need to think about extensibility as in compatibility with the extenders that came before this paradigm. Right? And we think about that a lot. Believe me. Like, we we really spend a ton of time, thinking about that, and we look at the, the feedback that we receive, and we make sure that we poster this transition to to blocks in the most seamless way possible. And this is also why sometimes we are overly cautious with what we do because we know that, a huge amount of people, are are still using that old paradigm. And if they wanna dip their toes into into the block world, they want their things to work. However, something and this is basically what what Carl is saying. Something that I see sometimes in the public conversation is that sometimes people seem to be a little bit stuck in this older definition of what extensible means and in the older ways in the filters and the actions, while the blocks themselves are extensible by nature in the sense that you even the metaphor itself is basically the LEGO block. Right? You can put the LEGO block in the way you want. You can rearrange them. You can put a new purple block into between your two red blocks, and you can play around the way you want and build whatever you want. So the the blocks paradigm is way is philosophically, conceptually way more extensible than what we had before. Somehow, though, the workforce community sometimes seems to think that the block paradigm is less extensible than before or that it provides less freedom. And, again, in a sense, we've been trying we we've been trying a lot to make this transition, seamless. And in this way, sometimes, I feel we have enabled people to stay in their older ways because things just work, for example, in the way we've made, the the older filters compatible with the add to cart button. So if you had an extension that added something next to the add to cart button, it still works with the old filters. And so people are still, like, getting in their comfort zone of these old ways. But I think if you look at the blocks and now you can switch your framing of the blocks, you realize how everything is so much freer now, and you can just add your block, build your own, or take the third party extensions that have just one little block, and then you can move it around and compose with it in a much, in a much better way. So I I think in a sense, when we talk about extensibility, extensibility is way better in the blocks paradigm than it was, in the classic paradigm. I like to, as well, the just thinking about extensibility, I like to use block variations, which is something I don't think I don't hear a lot of people talking about. And that's where you take a block that's already provided to you from core or WooCommerce or or something else. And you can create, effectively a snapshot of it and then customize it from there. So you don't have to build your own, like, full blocks from scratch. You can take 99% of the thing you like about a block and then add, you maybe those two or three settings that you know your client always needs. And you just layer those in and then you get all the functionality and your little custom layer and it cuts down how much you have to maintain, it cuts down the complexity. You know, AI can build these things so quick as well can create a nice little integration for you. So there are just lots of of ways of extending that. The more we talk about it and the more you get into it the more you start to learn, you'll see those things pop up. And I I always get this this moment with Ollie customers. It's usually two of them. One is when they kind of get through the full site editing hump and they kind of see the the power of of what they've built and how we how much easier it is when they come back later to to to make a small tweak. But also on the builder, the builders, the freelancers, they always hit kind of an moment too when they're like, oh, I didn't know about block variations or a lot of these little things that are they're they're kind of buried and that they're layered into the experience, but you you won't see them until you get until you need them, basically. So, maybe that's something we need to be better about, like, trying to to surface these little tips and tricks, but there's there's a lot so many ways to to extend. And fun fact, actually, the product collection itself was originally a variation of the Query Loop block from Gutenberg. Then we found out that we needed to work it. It's mostly actually a lot of the plumbing is still like the old Gutenberg variation under the hood, but you can go pretty far. In fact, a lot of our blocks are variations of Gutenberg blocks. That's true. And, in terms of extensibility, I think we need to mention interactivity API. That's a kinda new way to extend the blocks, but it gives the data layer to to it adds the data layer to extenders. So some blocks have the private stores. But, in more and more blocks, we're adding the public store, which, gives the extender the the access to to inner state of the block and ability to, react on actions that we define, that we expose or callbacks. So that's yet another, world of of extending, blocks, which is super powerful, like, because it gives, the way to, you know, react on interactive stuff that is happening on a page. Brian, you were talking about the the upsells and cross sells within the mini cart, which hopefully like, I was working on this actually. I don't know if you knew it, but, hopefully, I get it merged today or tomorrow. What Carlos, is saying, it it gives us the ability to do really powerful things. For example, in this case of the you have the mini cart, and as the as the people add new products to the mini cart, the mini cart can kind of broadcast what products are there to the product collection. And so the product collection updates in real time with the upsells depending on what you put in the mini cart. You don't have to reload. And as as you are adding the products from the product collection within the mini cart, then they disappear from that place, and then new upsells and cross sells get calculated depending on the state there. And this is all done without the mini cart knowing anything about what's inside it, right, because of these extensibility points that, that allow us to basically make the blocks communicate with each other and take the state of from one another and calculate and handle things in creative ways, and you can really go far. And what I like. about it, there there is an interface. There is an actual interface. There is a standard way of doing that because, previously, in a classic way, you you could obviously implement that with the custom JavaScript, probably jQuery back then. Here, there is an interface to to do so. Yeah. And I'm curious for some of these things. There's a lot of this that's inside of WooCommerce. Like, the one benefit is that a lot of these blocks are just in WooCommerce, but there's always gonna be, like, some segment of things that's just not part of WooCommerce, like contact forms and marketing integrations and even stuff that's not in core, like subscriptions and maybe, like, from the theme design layer. I'm curious, Mike, if block themes have changed your approach because you were obviously making themes in the classic theme era and probably dealt with five different form plug in integrations and that sort of things. But when you look at block themes, has that made, like, kind of general styling across your site and across all your different, like, necessary plugins easier, or do you have to do additional work around that? Yeah. It's it's way easier in that, you know, with with block themes, you kind of have a living, breathing design system built in to to to the interface. And, because of the nature of it and the way data flows now, again, like, this is available to agents. They will know how to work with your with your with your theme and your whole ecosystem because they can read your tokens in in your, your design system. So, I don't think of it, you know, I I think of of Ollie as, you know, it's a it is a it's a WordPress block theme and it it provides the design layer. But for me and how I think about it is, yep, that's the design layer. And now let me build my experience up from there. And then everything I build, all of the patterns, the blocks, the integration into WooCommerce, it all lives on that design layer. And it makes it so easy for me to adjust things on a global level or in a granular level or, any kind of, design variations I need. They all can kind of be based off of this system. And there's there's even just in the in the, global styles, there are so many things you could do that you could never do before in in WordPress. So, you know, I see, a lot of the freelancers and the agencies. They again, that's an moment they have when they realize that they can now have this kind of live design system, and it's they can expose some of those things to their clients and lock some of it down. All of this is possible because of the way block themes are architected and what it provides. Nice. Now I wanna leave time for, like, the q and a. So if you have questions, just throw them in the chat. But I want to talk a little bit, maybe just skip to AI because I do think that's going to be something that a lot of our agency developers and plugin developers are going to be thinking about. The idea of if I take something like PRPL and OLLI and I stick it in front of codecs or claud, is it gonna be able to do things to, you know, basically get the design that I want, get the get really the functionality that I want and stuff. And so I'm kind of curious if maybe starting with, like, the Woo team, like, when you're building blocks and and thinking about purple as a theme, are you thinking about that a user might not even enter the site editor for the first 80% of what they're doing and they might actually ask an agent to do it. And how do you think about the way block themes work now and if if it's if it's agent friendly and if there's kind of, like, good approaches to that? We've discussed that with Lucia the other day. So sorry if I'm gonna steal some of your thoughts, Lucia. But blocks are declarative by nature, and this is great for agents, to work with them. So I think, Lucio, you told me that. But in the same way as markdown is super friendly for agents, right, and it became a standard to communicate, you know, blocks are just HTML with comments, and theme. Json is actually a JSON, very declarative, you know, file with a very specific structure. So this is actually perfect for, you know, machine for for agents to to work with, with the documentation. And, even, yeah, the the existing structure, they can follow-up on this. They can build on top of that. They can extend the thin JSON global styles, or, you know, adjust the the templates, patterns, or block markups, using using the the the structure they have. Yeah, Yeah. Mike. I used curious. to be the, Yeah. Go ahead. you know, when when I've been using kind of AI with with blocks and MCPs since it's been dripped into into core and into these, experimental plugins. And, you know, at first, I was like, oof, this this block markup, I think, might be trouble for agents, just because it is it is different. It's a lot to send back and forth. But, in the less than a a year that it's kind of been here and we've been working this way, it's gotten so much better. And with things like Opus 5.5 and it's like, it's almost irrelevant. It already knows how to work with this stuff way better than it did just a few months ago. There's so much more context and and and it learns as it goes along. So, I'm not so so worried about that anymore. It can chug through it and it understands it And, so I don't think that'll be the a sticking point like I thought it was. And I think that's that's great news. You know, we Brian and I had a a podcast recently talking about how do we get agents to use WordPress and, I think this is one of the ways it does and it helps is that it's learned it, it knows it, it can it can operate with it, it knows maybe how to solve these problems that the user is asking for. All of these things add up to a much better experience for agents and, for us. Yeah. That I'm kind of in the same boat where I I do feel like the the tools have gotten so powerful that they sort of don't seem to care about it. And I there's probably another aspect of it, which is that in previous eras of WordPress, you might have been on Storefront for a WooCommerce store, but you might have been on ShoptoMizer. You might have been on Elementor. You might have been on, like, you know, any number of other page builders, Blocksy, like, you know, all these different things. And they did all speak their own different language. And so I'm I'm hopeful to hear that a lot of this stuff is go is is really centralizing on one workflow, you know, theme JSON, template files, blocks. If everybody's speaking the same language, we're gonna have a lot more success. And just the tools that come out of core are going to, are gonna really, you know, make a lot of this easier. And so I'm kind of, I guess, maybe, like, as a a wrap up question for everyone, maybe, like, a question to the community, which is, you know, what would what do you think what do you think, is missing, or what do you think we should be prioritizing as we think about now that we have some really good basic block themes and we have really blocks that cover every aspect of WooCommerce store? Like, what's the next biggest, you know, sort of pain point that you and your mind are thinking about and tackling and and just kind of grappling with these days? And it's kind of a surprise question, but if anybody wants to take a first stab at it, I'd love to hear, like, where your head is going forward. I, I can take a stab at it. First of all, I think block work is not done yet. It is amazing how how much we have advanced in the past couple of years and how much you can do, and also thanks to Purple, I would say, all the behind the scenes of us, figuring it out. But block work is still ongoing, and we still improve them, and we want feedback from people on what's missing. And we know that certain things are, are still missing. Other than that, I think off the top of my head, what's, what's next is, well, it's two things. First of all, it's convincing, people to, give block blocks a try. Because maybe you've tried blocks, like, three years ago, and then it was very different. And you got to very and you got a very different opinion on what you could do back then. And I think, so there needs to be from our part, and purple, I think, is part of this push, a push on getting people on board with this project. And second, I would say that this connects with one of your questions. It's basically how do we make sure that, the tools are as powerful as people need them to be. So the to be fair, the site editor is sometimes still quite confusing. We are in including, Gutenberg folks are working a lot on trying to figure out the UX. This is a problem that's been basically since the beginning of the Internet. Right? Like, whenever the Internet was, starting, people have tried to build no code, interfaces to build websites, and it's always been difficult. So it's by no means a solved problem. And now you have the AI can help you with that for sure, but the human interface still is a high priority. And I think a lot of improvements need to go in how to make the experience as intuitive and as seamless as possible, to make sure that you can actually bring your vision to life whether you use AI or not. Of course, AI, in a sense, because it's getting more powerful and because it's, has a ton of context. It's actually an easy customer, so to speak. You know? You what we can do to improve for AI is very, very small steps. You can just put, like, some comments on the, JSON properties of, of a block, and then you nudge the AI in the right direction. It's very easy to to to build an interface for AI. Building an interface for humans is a little bit more difficult, but I think it's still important. I think the editor and, the the relationship you have with your site when you're actually building it out of blocks like with Legos, I think it's a different kind of relationship. And I think we need to preserve it and we need to improve it. That that will be what's top of my mind. Nice. Anyone, else? just follow-up on that because I I agree with it so much. The I don't think you know, there there's gonna be philosophical conversations we have about some of the technical stuff, and those will be things we discussed. But, you know, having AI as a as a counterpart to help solve those technical challenges makes those a lot easier. But the big problem not problem, but the big hurdle is still the experience inside the editor. And, not even necessarily the block editor, but how all these things, these paradigms fit together, and that flow. It's it's important for WordPress courts. It's debatable even more important for something like WooCommerce. And, it's important to remember it has gotten way better. Every release it gets they they hammer out something else. They smooth something out. Like, it has gotten really good. And I'm excited to see, Brian had a prototype out there that kind of combined things like the site editor and the WP admin experience into something that's more uniform. That is a huge improvement, I think. And as much as I do use AI and think agents are gonna handle a lot of things for us, I think the the human interface is still going to be very important as we're all kind of tinkerers and visual creatures. We like to get in there and and tinker things and, not everyone has access to AI right now and wants to wait, you know, thirty seconds to change a color, you know. So I I think that's gonna be more and more, important as we go on. So that's where I'm kind of as somebody who has a block theme and just really wants to unlock this experience and create, like, seamless and and cohesive experiences, that's where I'm kind of, hoping to to see change and and help with as well. Yeah. For me, you know, as everyone said here, like, block, work is not done. And, like, in purple, we were recognizing the gaps and tried to cover them, in core, you know, making the blocks more customizable. Of course, I tried Ollie. I played around with with, WooCommerce with Ollie WooCommerce theme. I specifically checked the custom CSS that had to be applied to achieve the certain results. And in ideal world, I would like this CSS to be gone, you know, so anything that is there to be possible with blocks. And I think this is one of the, aims that we we can have, like, goals for future. Nice. I'm gonna invite Shani back up to go through we have a q and a panel, so throw any questions, or we can even pull some comments from chat, and we can spend the next few minutes, going through some of these. Okay. So, the first one that we had, comes from, and it is what are the best practices to create a theme using fsc theme .json but use atomic? So share that over there, and I got a lot of likes. So curious to hear what everybody else to say there. I think Carol has a lot of experience with this, recently. yeah. So let's hear, Carol. Go ahead. Well, you know, first of all, you need to kinda learn, the this is one of the challenges, I think, of the blocks, that you need to learn the semantics of, how the the primitives are represented in Gutenberg because this is not one to one, between the regular CSS and what's represented in global styles. But once you get there, like, once you see what is there, what is available, you know, you define the set of your variable variables and then try to use them across the different blocks and sticking to to what you defined. I guess, you know, in the current, era, AI can help a lot with that. So once you when you design your tokens, like your variables, you know, sticking to them, is crucial part, like not inventing the new variables, not changing the spacing and this stuff, so you get the cohesive experience in your theme that you created. And I think I think also, one of the one of the layers of purple was exactly to answer this question. And, I I know I think, Albert, one of my colleagues, it might be it might be in the audience, was very passionate about this. We want purple to be this thing for you, something that you can look at the code and you can see what the best practices are. So if you haven't, go to the repo and take a look at PRPL's code to see what we think are the best practices. And we will continue to use PRPL to as, like, a living organism of, what we currently think is the best way to do something in an FSC way. Yeah. It looks like, Yes. Vitali had said leaving because talk is cheap, and we need demonstrations. So, actually, I think this is a pretty good candidate to kind of illustrate the utilization of of AI to, to create that organization, that level of organization, especially from that, from a global perspective. Sorry. I think I cut somebody off who was speaking. Yeah. I think it was me. I wanted, like, to follow-up on what Lucio said. Purple is still an early access, so there is still some stuff that we are working on to, you know, call it, like, fully best practice theme. But one of the one of the goals that we have is to reduce the custom CSS to the minimum. We actually keep the whole definition of the theme in the theme. Json file. This is one of the practices that we would like to promote. So, actually, I think that's a pretty good dovetail into Himanshu's, question, which is, is there any AI still to create block memes using AI? And so I personally don't know of one right now, but Brian maybe might be Yeah. I mean, I'll do a pitch for the ones I know of, and then we can see what else. to has a agent skills, and I believe there's one that's a block theme development, to there. And I'll put these links in the chat, but. there's one in in wordpress.org has a just a WordPress agent skills package, which I definitely recommend. And it covers a lot of other things like actual development stuff, but, I think there's a block theme one. And then, WordPress Studio, which is Automattic's local development app that works really well with WooCommerce and, like, our hosting plugins, has a bunch of built in skills into it. But if you don't if you already have a local development app and you don't wanna use it, it's completely open source. So I'll paste a link to those skills because those ones were really fine tuned for block themes as well. And so you can actually just steal them from the repo because it's all open source, but you could also use Studio, and it'll kinda use those skills by default. But I'm curious if there's other ones that, people are aware of. I just I just don't even know if you need or will need a skill for very long at all. I think the theme block theme paradigm and and what's in there and tokens are already very understandable to agents. And I think if you were to ask one right now without a skill, it would create a perfectly fine, block theme to to get started and explain to you the different pieces of it. So, I would check out the ones ones Brian's mentioned, but, I think any AI platform agent will be able to to get you a a long way there. And also looking at at Ollie and purple just to see just to understand the the structure of them. And you'll find that actually you'll you'll when you look at these themes, you'll say, these what is this? It seems like there's barely anything here, because it's not like themes like we used to have where we had all the stuff in there. It's effectively a light design layer with some tokens in it, and that adds up to, like, a design system. So, you don't need to overcomplicate it. There's only so many typography scales you can have that are gonna be legible. There's only so many colors that can you know, you can put in the thing. So I would say keep it simple to start. Okay. And then I had one. Just why now, and what are the benefits of having block theme in this current market? And who do you envision as the best end users to maximize a theme's utilization? So in terms of, you know, agencies, in terms of, you know, having, like, multisites or things that are, replicable, kind of who who do you think is gonna benefit most from using BlockMean? I think definitely, nontechnical merchants users, that expect a low code solution, you know, because there's so much stuff that you can do on your own just by using the editor, without writing any custom code or looking at code. So that's one thing. And from the agency's perspective, I think that anyone that, you know, at the end of the development of of the store, you are about to hand over to to the, you know, merchants, to the single person, whoever, and and the person is gonna handle the store afterwards. You know, handing them over the block, the block store is much easier for them to maintain, to customize, to change small things, to experiment with than, handing over the the classic store. That's my impression. And then would you. say in terms of, like, coming up against, you know, site builders that are already out there, obviously, I think WOO specifically is kind of a little bit more unique in terms of what we can I think the customization extends further than what you can usually get from, other site builders? So, I think that is still really, like, this point of, exploration and and what we need to kind of harp on a little bit. So I guess what would you say is, like, that divergence, from other site builders? Well, having it on the core level and not having to worry about a page builder at all and then getting, you know, large scale buy in creates this this more cohesive, predictable experience for everyone. You know, page builders were were kind of created to solve these problems for us because cause we didn't have the stuff in WordPress, but now we do have it. And, I think that's a super powerful idea. And so when I'm thinking about why now, why should you, it's because now we have this incredible experience in in WordPress and the sooner you buy into it, I understand if you have a store, it's, you know, it's a little bit harder to to to transition. But I would say now is the time so that you can take advantage of the performance benefits. And we know how much performance impacts conversions. It's huge. Even milliseconds can make a difference. The cost and performance as well in other ways. All of these things are available now if you can switch over to a block theme and start using it and being able to tap into AI and and have just, much more granular control and power at your hands. It's much easier to do that with a block theme, than it is a traditional theme. So, now is the time. If if not a few years ago, now's the time, and, hopefully, this conversation's a good catalyst for that. Okay. You guys you tell, like, a favorite block. Paragraph block. Oh, classic. The goat. Nice choice. I don't know. Like, my heart goes to product collection. Like, I spent lots of time on it, and this is, like, my child. Also, I just wanna remind everybody that feedback is great. Sure. So if you have feedback on Purple, if you have feedback on, your block experiences, you can find us in the WooCommerce community Slack. We have a whole, channel that's dedicated to talking about blocks, and, all of these engineers are here in it. So you can directly interface about that. If you have a question, if you have something that you'd like to see in terms of the feature, and, of course, if you run into something that isn't working right, you know, obviously, let us know, and we will try our best to get it slated to be worked on. So, any any final thoughts, last words? It was really informative. Thank you. Yeah. I just want, as my last words, hopefully, not in my life, but of this talk, I want to, echo echo what you just, was just said. I I I want I want people to know that we are really listening, and I want them to know that do reach out, whether it's on GitHub, on Slack. We do read the conversations. We we do engage with them. If I don't, like, tag me personally. I'm really interested in getting this kind of feedback from real people, and I'm really interested in working with the community in making the workovers blocks better. So, maybe sometimes it feels like, there is a there is a ton of people working behind the scenes, so it's a maybe there is a a little bit of a disconnect disconnected feeling. But, really, like, I, like, reach out in the community. We do engage, and I I really want, that kind of feedback personally. Alright. I don't know if we're gonna get, like, booted out or what happens, but we just, reached the end of the hour. So thanks so much for hanging with us. And, again, find us in the community Slack on the developer blog, this developer.woocommerce.com. And, yeah, we hope to see you guys in the world of Luxe. Bye. Thank you.