Helping one of the world’s most popular e-commerce platforms embrace the future of WordPress.
Blockifying Commerce
When I joined the WooCommerce team, the platform was still deeply rooted in classic WordPress themes. The block editor was gaining momentum across the WordPress ecosystem, but WooCommerce’s core shopping experience — product pages, carts, checkouts — was still built on legacy PHP templates and shortcodes. Blocks were a novelty, not the foundation.
As someone who’d been on the Gutenberg team from the beginning, my job was to help WooCommerce make the leap. I worked with the team to redesign the foundational e-commerce blocks that would eventually replace those legacy templates — the building blocks of every online store.
The Blocks
I redesigned a number of core product blocks that shipped as part of WooCommerce’s “blockified” single product template — the initiative to make every piece of a product page a composable, customizable block:
- Product Gallery — The visual centerpiece of any product page. Image browsing, zoom, thumbnails — all rebuilt as a block that store owners could actually rearrange and customize.
- Product Price — Deceptively complex. What looks like a simple number has to handle multiple currencies, sale prices, discount ranges, tax display preferences, and variable product pricing — all while offering a clean UI for customizing how each element appears.
- Product Reviews — Customer reviews, ratings, and the review submission form, redesigned as blocks that could be placed anywhere in a product template.
- Shopping Cart — The cart experience, rebuilt from shortcode to block. A critical piece of the checkout flow that needed to work seamlessly with block themes.
- And more — Various product metadata, ratings, and detail blocks that together form the complete product page experience.
The Price Block
If I had to pick a favorite, it’d be the price block. It seems so simple on the surface — it’s just a number, right? But then you start thinking about all the edge cases: currencies with different symbol placements, sale prices with strikethroughs, percentage discounts, price ranges for variable products, tax-inclusive vs. tax-exclusive display, bulk pricing tiers. Every store in every country expects their prices to look a certain way.
The fun part was working through all of those possibilities while keeping the block editor UI clean and intuitive. Store owners shouldn’t need to think about the complexity — they should just see their price, looking exactly right, with simple controls to adjust what they need.
The Bigger Picture
This work was part of a broader effort to make WooCommerce a first-class citizen in the block editor era. The “blockified” templates meant store owners could finally customize their product pages the same way they’d customize any other page in WordPress — by arranging blocks in the Site Editor. No more rigid PHP templates. No more “you’ll need a developer for that.”
It was a bridge between two worlds: WooCommerce’s massive existing ecosystem of classic themes and extensions, and the modern block-based future that WordPress was building toward.