What we’re doing to get the Woo Block Theme ready for you

The Woo Block Theme is our next-generation theme designed for a fast, modern, and fully block-based store experience. It’s built from the ground up to take full advantage of WordPress block themes, while supporting the unique needs of WooCommerce merchants and developers.

The theme marks our first official WooCommerce block theme, and we’re publishing it to WordPress.org for developers and merchants to try out, extend, and learn from. We’ll also be unveiling its official name when we submit it.

Why we’re doing this

This theme serves multiple purposes:

• It’s a learning experience for our team and the broader community, one that’s already helped us improve key blocks.
• It provides a real-world reference for developers building themes and extensions for WooCommerce block themes.
• It’s a starting point for developers to explore the power of the block editor.

We’re building this theme in the open, so you can follow along, give feedback, and reuse what works.

A theme built entirely with blocks

To power a native block experience, we’re refining WooCommerce’s most essential blocks, ensuring they are not only functional, but flexible, extensible, and visually consistent in any block-based theme. The Single Product template is a key area of focus, since it directly impacts how products are displayed, customized, and purchased.

Improving the product gallery

The Product Gallery block has been extensively improved to support a more immersive, reliable product viewing experience. These improvements not only enhance user experience, but also unlock future capabilities.

Recent work includes:

• Fixing issues that blocked page scrolling or caused misaligned thumbnails (#58398, #58424, #58560)
• Enhancing accessibility by improving alt attributes and keyboard focus (#58480, #58505)
• Adding support for “auto” thumbnail aspect ratios (#58162)
• Preparing integration with the new Product Image block (#58651)

Making add to cart more extensible

The Add to Cart + Options block plays a central role in product pages. We’re making it more powerful by focusing on extensibility, variation support, and keyboard accessibility, while also ensuring compatibility with existing WooCommerce extensions.

Key enhancements:

• Displaying error messages for better UX (#58491)
• Supporting default attributes and dropdown logic for variations (#58464)
• Restoring grouped product names in the editor (#58490)
• Extending PHP hook support for third-party plugins (#58473)
• Cleaning up styling and warnings for better reliability (#58510, #58575)
• Supporting grouped product add-to-cart (#58002)
• Removing feature flags and enabling public builds (#58602)
• Simplifying font sizes and improving navigation consistency (#58653, #58598)

Enhancing the product image block

To make the Product Image block more flexible and reusable, we’re adding support for inner blocks and dynamic image handling:

• The block now supports a dynamic imageId, so it can be reused in contexts like the Product Gallery or custom templates (#57590)
• This also lays the groundwork for future features like image selection and badge customization via inner blocks
  

Blockifying product details

We’re taking a thoughtful approach to “blockifying” core product details like specifications, reviews, and metadata. Instead of building new blocks from scratch, we’ve upgraded the existing ones to support global styles and better extensibility, while maintaining backwards compatibility.

Highlights:

Product Specifications block now inherits styling from the core Table block and respects theme.json global styles (#59021)

Preparing for theme submission

While the blocks are reaching a stable state, we’re also preparing the Woo Block Theme itself for submission:

• Core templates and patterns have been finalized by our design team
• Placeholder image work is underway for both product samples and theme visuals
• Compatibility testing with Woo built extensions is ongoing
• We’re close to releasing a demo site, which showcases the theme

Join the conversation–and help us test

We’re excited to bring this theme to the community and to build in public, but we can’t do it alone.

As soon as the theme is live on WordPress.org, we’ll share instructions on how to install, test, and provide feedback. Whether you’re a theme builder, extension developer, or merchant trying block themes for the first time, your feedback will directly shape the next phase of development.

We’re especially interested in:

• Testing compatibility with extensions
• Identifying gaps or issues in core WooCommerce blocks
• Improving the onboarding experience for block-based stores
• Suggestions for patterns, style variations, and documentation

👉 Join the Woo Blocks & Themes Slack channel
👉 Open an issue in the Woo Themes GitHub repo
👉 Watch this space for our post-launch testing instructions

We’re just getting started—and we’re grateful to be building this together with you. 🎉

Want to be the first to test?

We’ll share more detailed testing instructions soon, once the theme is published on WordPress.org. In the meantime, if you’re comfortable testing from source, you can manually install the theme from GitHub.

How to install the Woo Block Theme manually

1. Go to the Woo Themes GitHub repo:
   https://github.com/woocommerce/woo-themes/
2. Click the green “Code” button and choose “Download ZIP”
   (This will download the entire woo-themes repo, not just the theme)
3. Unzip the downloaded folder
4. Find the woostarter folder inside
   (located at /woo-themes/trunk/woostarter)
5. Compress just the woostarter folder into a new zip file:
   • On macOS: Right-click > Compress “woostarter”
   • On Windows: Right-click > Send to > Compressed (zipped) folder
6. Upload the theme to your WordPress site:
   • Go to Appearance > Themes
   • Click Add New > Upload Theme
   • Select the zip you just created and click Install Now
7. Make sure you are using at least WooCommerce 10.0. Follow our Beta Testing guide to get the latest non-production version of WooCommerce.
8. Activate the theme and start exploring!

⚠️ Note: This is an early, in-development theme meant for testing. Use it on a staging or local site, and let us know what you find!

Found an issue? Report it to the Woo Themes GitHub repo, or reach out to us in the Woo Blocks & Themes Slack channel.