WordCamp US 2026 is just around the corner. There’s been some concern around potentially low attendance, but I’m not worried. WCUS is always a late bloomer. We’ll be missing a few people, but I have no doubt that the conversations and talks will still be valuable.
Speaking of talks, I’ll be there presenting my talk: “The Site Is the Source of Truth: Block Themes, AI, and Agency Workflows”. This is something I’ve been thinking about over the last year, and plan to explore more over the coming weeks. My blog has years of posts about block theming from the agency perspective, but I’ve been working on the product side the last year, so my concerns have shifted.
I’ve posted a call for comments on Twitter from anyone who is launching sites/stores with block themes. I’ve followed that up with a short survey that I invite anyone to fill out. I have some of my own ideas for the talk, but I want to hear from everyone in the community about what’s working, how AI has impacted you, and what still needs to happen for block themes to really take off.
Hope to see you there!
Links from around the web
On WordPress
Mike McAlister joined me on Webmasters.fm to talk about Woo themes, Ollie, and thoughtful AI/MCP integration. I’m currently pestering Mike to become a more regular co-host.
WordPress 7.1 is bringing more consistent admin navigation and a persistent “omnibar”, especially inside the editor. This was one of my original complaints about the site editor (the lack of the WordPress admin bar), so I’m excited to see it finally improved. For more info, Matt Medeiros covers 7.1 in less than 235 seconds on YouTube, but I think there’s much left out.
The Repository breaks down why Matt Mullenweg vetoed the proposed Knowledge post type. I agree. User-facing AI features need real-world adoption before landing in core. Meanwhile, we need to make sure agents can better interact with the block editor, like getting MCP abilities to interact with posts, users, and blocks.
Responsive block styles are finally happening. If you have custom blocks, you may want to test them out. For example, I had no idea you could map block styles to specific inner elements instead of just the outer wrapper, something that works out of the box with responsive styles (if you used it correctly).
Speaking of custom blocks and block themes, the new WordPress VIP website is a great example of what a polished block theme can do, especially the custom-block mega menu.
What else can you do with block themes? Justin Tadlock found a wonderfully simple way to dynamically load template parts in block themes, a new approach to the typical sidebar.php of classic themes.
Have you seen this prototype for UX improvements to the Site Editor? I’ve love to see this gain some traction.
On WooCommerce
Last week I hung out with James Kemp and Katie Keith on Do the Woo, chatting about the modern WooCommerce developer workflow.
Pressable published a recap and full recording of our AI Workflows for WordPress and WooCommerce conversation, covering Abilities, MCP, and preparing for agentic commerce. This was fun to host and the panel, including guests from SkyVerge, Pressable, and Automattic for Agencies, was particularly good.
For WooCommerce block themers, I wrote up how to build category- and type-specific product templates for block themes with the Template Registration API and a few filters. Custom product templates is one of the things I hear a lot of complaints about with Woo block themes, but with a few lines of code, the problems tend to go away.
Over at Woo, we’ve been diving into docs. The WooCommerce CLI documentation is much easier to browse now that commands have dedicated pages and missing arguments have been added. We’ve also opened a discussion for the community to share their documentation needs with us.
We’re also focusing on cleaning up our foundational plugin and extensions, like merging “All Products for Subscriptions” into WooCommerce Subscriptions. You can follow along at our Product Updates feed.
On AI
Open source is grappling with AI code contributions. Some are banning them outright, others are adding additional guardrails, including Woo. Woo is introducing a temporary three-PR limit for external contributors to protect our reviewers time and attention while keeping AI-assisted contributions welcome.
Tom Bedor makes a strong case that asking for human attention should require human effort, especially in the age of AI-generated content and contributions. I’ve been feeling the weight of AI slop recently, in others but also in myself. I’ve recently decided that my ability to write is worth preserving, and I’m leaning less on AI for critical thinking and writing.
Aurooba’s argument that AI is not a tool asks which parts of our work only existed because intelligence used to be scarce. What happens when we think of AI not as a tool, but as another programming language itself?
That’s all! Hope to see you in Phoenix.
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