What’s New With Woo?  🔗 **Source:** [What’s New With Woo?](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OkIVNKJADVo) > [!note]+ Document Notes > --- > tags: [woocommerce, block-themes, issue-backlog, agentic-commerce, model-context-protocol, extension-ecosystem] > author: The WP Minute > source: YouTube — The WP Minute (Member Meetup) > reference: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OkIVNKJADVo > date created: 2026-08-24 09:00 > --- > > [!info] Generated analysis — not the author's words. Sections below are machine-written > > from the captured source. Only text inside `> [!quote]` blocks is verbatim from the author. > > Do not quote or attribute any other line to the named author. > # 🏷️ Title: What's New With Woo? (July 2026 Member Meetup) > ## 🧭 Table of Contents > - [📝 Summary](#-summary) > - [📖 Main Content](#-main-content) > - [🗒️ Notes](#️-notes) > - [📚 References](#-references) > - [🗣️ Paraphrase](#️-paraphrase) > - [📰 Newsletter](#-newsletter) > - [✅ Action Items](#-action-items) > - [🧪 Hypotheses](#-hypotheses) > - [📊 Methodology](#-methodology) > - [❓ Questions](#-questions) > - [🔮 Future Research](#-future-research) > - [💡 Implications](#-implications) > - [🧠 Learning Styles Assessment](#-learning-styles-assessment) > - [📊 Accessibility Assessment](#-accessibility-assessment) > - [🌍 DEIB Assessment](#-deib-assessment) > - [✅ Logical Validity](#-logical-validity) > - [🛡️ DARVO Analysis](#-darvo-analysis) > - [🎯 Conclusion](#-conclusion) > ### 🔗 References > - [The WP Minute](https://thewpminute.com/) — publisher; member meetup series, Matt Medeiros present > - [developer.woo.com](https://developer.woo.com/) — the Woo developer blog, newsletter, and documentation hub named as the central place to follow this work > - [WooCommerce on GitHub](https://github.com/woocommerce/woocommerce) — where the issue-backlog cleanup is visible > - [WordPress Playground](https://wordpress.github.io/wordpress-playground/) — discussed and its limits for Woo named > - [Studio by WordPress.com](https://developer.wordpress.com/studio/) — Automattic's local development tool with a built-in agent > - [Ollie](https://olliewp.com/) — the block theme the guest says he personally uses for his own Woo builds > - [Storefront](https://wordpress.org/themes/storefront/) — the decade-old classic Woo theme the new block theme succeeds > ## 📝 Summary > - **What happened.** The WP Minute's July 2026 member meetup, hosted with Matt Medeiros present and featuring Brian Richards, developer advocate at WooCommerce. It is a wide-ranging status update: a deliberate multi-quarter issue-backlog cleanup, the core-versus-extension boundary problem, a settings UI modernization that auto-converts PHP field definitions to React, an unreleased first-party block theme, and three distinct strands of AI work. > - **Why it matters.** Two items have real substance behind them. The **backlog cleanup** is a stated commitment to get GitHub down to a couple hundred open issues with nothing older than roughly six months, against five-to-seven-year-old issues currently in there — with an explicit norm that filing a bug earns a response even when the answer is "expected behavior." And the **settings auto-conversion** is a genuinely clever piece of platform design: because Woo already has a PHP class where extensions declare their settings as an array, Woo can render those same declarations in React without the extension author doing anything. > - **Key stakeholders.** Store owners running 10–30 plugins; extension developers facing a settings-UI migration they did not ask for and may not need to do; agencies deciding block-versus-shortcode on new builds; the wider WordPress project, since Woo is explicitly used as the proving ground for decisions core later inherits. > - **Risks and tradeoffs.** The AI section is heavily forward-looking and partly embargoed — the guest twice says he did not get permission to show things and "probably should have asked" what he could say. Agentic commerce is honestly labeled as not actually happening yet. The block checkout's extensibility limits are acknowledged rather than solved. And the settings unification will flatten extension branding, which some plugin authors have already objected to. > - **Bottom line.** The consistent theme is **Woo pushing functionality down into core blocks and core APIs so it arrives everywhere at once** — the block theme is thin because the blocks are thick; WordPress 7.1's responsive styles land free across 100+ Woo blocks; shipment tracking becomes one extensible API rather than per-provider UIs. The AI work is real but mostly unreleased, and the most concrete near-term wins are unglamorous: fewer old bugs, a consistent settings UI, and a much better product catalog screen. > ## 📖 Main Content > The meetup opens on the least glamorous and probably most consequential item: **WooCommerce is spending several quarters clearing its GitHub issue backlog.** Richards frames this against a pressure every large open source project now shares — AI-generated pull requests arriving in volume. His description is even-handed rather than dismissive: people "vibe code to PR and send it to you, which is rough. It's nice, but it's rough," because human review and triage still cost the same regardless of how cheaply the submission was produced. Combined with the ordinary backlog that any large-install-base platform accumulates, the project reached a point of deciding to just clear it. > James Kemp, the product lead, is triaging and assigning through the product and engineering teams. The target is a couple hundred open issues with nothing older than roughly half a year, replacing issues currently five to seven years old. Richards describes closing one about a button that did not work, filed five years earlier, whose history showed it added to a list, removed, and orphaned when the engineer left. The stated principle is the good part: **if someone put in the effort to file a bug report, the project owes them a resolution or at least a clear answer** — including "that's expected behavior, not a priority." He is explicit that these are "not fun exciting features" but "paper cuts that just people deal with every day," which is the same framing and nearly the same vocabulary as Ella van Dorpe's block editor paper cuts effort in the Gutenberg project. > The host raises the harder strategic question, referencing his own op-ed in The WP Minute newsletter: WooCommerce can sell anything and do almost anything through extensions, but the result "becomes a little bit of a tangled mess" once you stack extensions and payment providers. Can Woo become a more user-friendly all-in-one? > Richards's answer is a clear no, with reasoning. Woo core is "just the foundational layer," and he does not believe there will ever be a Jetpack-style bundle for it, because **the things stores need most are precisely the things that vary most** — every store uses different payment, email, shipping, and tax providers. What Woo can do is tier the ecosystem. A small set of first-class extensions get built or partnered directly: payment providers, with WooPayments working closely with Stripe; ad and channel connections to Google, TikTok, Reddit; marketing tools like Klaviyo and Mailchimp. Beyond that, he says plainly, "it's a wild west." Most extensions installed on Woo stores do not come from Woo's marketplace, which means no revenue share and no control. The marketplace is the first line of quality — listing requires substantial integration, unit, and release testing — but he expects the average store to run 10 to 30 plugins and doubts that changes. > There is movement toward consolidation at the margins: add-ons bundled into Subscriptions, and some plugins that previously cost around $70 a month folded into core for free. The stated heuristic is what roughly 80% of users actually need. His closing framing is worth keeping: this "is not even a WooCommerce problem, it's an e-commerce problem," which is true but also somewhat convenient. > **Shipment tracking, currently in beta, is the model for how Woo intends to resolve these cases.** Everyone needs tracking and the "your package is on its way" email regardless of carrier, so Woo builds "the extensible API that anybody can hook into and anybody can do it and they can't break it," plus one user interface — and providers do their own work on top. General funct Hi everyone. Welcome to the WP Minute's member meetup for July 2026 where we're talking about what's new with Woo. We've got uh well, Matt Medeiros is here with us. He's always here with us. But, we've also got special guest Brian Richards. He's a developer advocate over at uh WooCommerce. Brian, welcome. >> Hey, thanks for having me. >> Uh before we get started, I just want to take a minute to uh also thank our pillar sponsors here at the WP Minute cuz we can't do anything without them. Uh thanks to Pressable, Jet Host, WP Engine, Hosting.com, 20i, GridPane, and Weglot. We very much appreciate your support and uh allowing us to do what we do here at the WP Minute. With that out of the way, um Brian, uh I know this has been a busy time for WooCommerce. It is um from what I understand, there's a lot of uh old bugs being squashed for one. >> Yeah, that that's uh we recently published a blog post about this from uh Bo, who's the head artistic director at WooCommerce. And I think anybody who works in open source is sort of dealing with this issue of number one, AI submissions coming in, AI PRs, people you know, vibe code to PR and send it to you, which is rough. It's nice, but it's rough cuz you know, it has still has to take human review, takes a lot of time. Now, we have to triage it, you know, that sort of stuff. Plus, I think WooCommerce, Gutenberg, WordPress, they all have such a backlog of issues because there's just so many things reported, so many users. They're you know, they're big platforms and stuff. So, finally we kind of hit a point they were like, "Let's just spend a few quarters just cleaning up the backlog of issues." And some of them I saw closed recently. It was like, "This one little button doesn't work." And it was reported 5 years ago, and it just never made it through you know, you can see the history of it was added to this list and then removed. And then that engineer doesn't work here anymore, you know, and it's all these things. So, they're finally going through uh James Kemp, who's the product lead, product manager, is sort of triaging all of this stuff and assigning it through the product teams, through the engineering. So, the goal is by the end of the summer, fall time to have the backlog of issues in GitHub extremely low with the idea that like if somebody gave put in the effort to file a bug report on GitHub, it really is our responsibility to fix it or, you know, some of them are we're just saying, "Yeah, that's not an issue. That's expected behavior. Not a priority." But, at least there's a response. At least there's like a clear answer. And we're trying to get it down to I think the goal is like a couple hundred open issues cuz you're always going to have some and nothing older than maybe half a year or something like that. And, you know, versus the 5 to 7-year-old ones we're finding in there now. So, that's been the big goal and it's been kind of interesting to see, you know, they're not fun exciting features sometimes, but they're like paper cuts that just people deal with every day and so the goal is that they'll go away over the next few months. >> That's awesome to see cuz I mean WooCommerce is so widely used and those little things that get in the way may actually be the driver of someone maybe deciding on another plugin or another way to sell things. So, it's like just showing that you care, taking that those that extra time to kind of go through that repo. That's a big deal. So, kudos to all of you guys for that because I think it's it's necessary. And I I hope WordPress does that one of these days. I know we had a release a couple of years ago that was nothing but bug fixes. I would like to see more of that as we go forward, but um as far as um WooCommerce itself, I don't know if you saw our newsletter uh this week, but I had uh a little op-ed about yeah, the the challenges Woo faces right now because it is this amazing tool with all these extensions. I mean, you know, you can sell whatever you want. You can have virtually any feature you want. Um, if you have a good developer who knows what they're doing. But, the problem is that sometimes it becomes a little bit of a tangled mess as you start adding uh, extensions and you start trying to deal with all these different payment providers. I've definitely run into that one myself. What would you say like in trying to make WooCommerce a more user-friendly all-in-one package type of deal? Like, how how how are you guys trying to approach that if you are trying to uh, get to that point? >> Yeah, I there that's definitely a topic that comes up a lot. Um, there's certain things in WooCommerce that I think most people need which are going to be extensions like payments you're probably going to need. You're probably going to need email marketing and you're probably going to need maybe some ad network connections, connect to Google, connect to TikTok, connect to Reddit, wherever you know, your audience is. There's a lot of these things but it's really hard to say like there's one set approach that every WooCommerce store needs. So, like WooCommerce itself, the free open-source plugin, really is just the foundational layer and I don't think there's ever going to be a way to like bundle everything and make like a jetpack type of plugin for WooCommerce that has everything you need because like the the funny thing about WooCommerce is like everybody is uses different payment providers, they use different email, they have different shipping integrations, they have different tax things that they're worried about. And so, there's a few like core things that are so important that we make the extension for or we partner with. So, like most of the payment providers we use like an official one, it's like we partner with them, we work really closely. Like, uh, if you use our payment provider WooPayments, we work with Stripe really closely. Just like last week I was at their Stripe agency e-commerce event and got to like meet some of the people that are our partners there. Um Google, the you know, those sorts of ones we partner, we do the first, you know, like we consider them first class extensions, but and then I think there's some marketing ones, Klaviyo, Mailchimp, that kind of stuff, but then after that, you know, it's a wild west. It's not like Shopify where you kind of go through their app store and they kind of control it. With WooCommerce, most of the people are installing extensions that don't even come from our marketplace that we have no not even we don't even get a percentage, we don't get anything, we don't we have no control over it. Um so like I think for us the first line is that marketplace because if a plugin is in our marketplace, they have to do an an insane amount of like integration testing, unit testing, release testing, all this sort of stuff. Um there's a little bit higher level of a quality control, but at the end of the day, people are going to probably average like 10 to 30 plugins on their Woo store and I'm not sure that that'll ever ever go away. Um but I think you'll see some of it starting to merge together like with with our subscriptions, there were some add-ons that were bundling into subscriptions to make that just one plugin. Um there's a few plugins we put into the core WooCommerce that were, you know, used to have to pay 70 bucks a month, we're just putting them bundling them getting them free. So we're trying to find like what's the balance, you know, what's the stuff that's important enough that like, you know, maybe 80% of the users are going to actually need and the rest is yeah, it's just going to be that extension thing. So uh that that is kind of the the way of e-commerce. I think that that's not even a WooCommerce problem, it's like an e-commerce problem. >> Yeah, and it it it's tough I mean, when you look at Shopify and some of these other uh proprietary systems, I think it's tough because you they kind of direct you of what you can and can't do and the beauty of WooCommerce is they you don't do that. You allow somebody to build it the way they want it. And yet, you know, there's there is a balance there. It's like, well, if I want this shipping uh shipping method, well, then I'm going to have to get an extension. What goes into core, what goes into an extension, you know, I I I cuz I I remember hearing that a while ago that maybe like table rate shipping might be merged into core at some point cuz that's kind of a basic shipping method. But, yeah, that that's kind of a I I don't want to have to make those decisions, but it's it's it's definitely tough when you have so many different use cases and you know, to try and wrangle that, basically you're wrangling ants. >> Yeah, that that is what it feels like and it's everybody has a different opinion on what should be in core. Uh there is a few things like um just even general shipment tracking is is in beta right now and that's a thing where it's like, okay, no matter what shipment provider you use, you probably want to manage your shipment tracking and trigger those emails that say, "Hey, your package is on its way." Like regardless of it. So, the way we have to approach it is, okay, well, we have to build the extensible API that anybody can hook into and anybody can do it and they can't break it and all these plugins can use it, but it's just like one API, one user interface for it. So, that one's in beta, that's probably a good example of like the general functionality comes, but like your own providers are probably going to have to do some work and then we can we can just be the foundational layer. >> Yeah, I I I saw something about you guys do also tweaking the settings UI for extensions, is that right? >> Yeah, so that the other that's the other big thing. This one is a big topic of debate internally. Um if you if you've used WordPress recently, you know that there's basically like classic WordPress, that's all the setting screens you're used to and everything's built on PHP and then there's the site editor in that modern WordPress where everything's built with JavaScript and React and the UI is a little bit nicer, a little bit cleaner. And so, if you've been building WooCommerce extensions, you we already have like a PHP class where you just say, "Hey, these are all the the settings fields I need. I need a checkbox to turn it on, and I need a text field for my API key and all that sort of stuff." And you just define it as like an array, and WooCommerce already loads it. So, then the team that's building our Woo Payments extension wanted to move to JavaScript, and they basically said, "Well, we already have all the information of what your fields are. Couldn't we just turn them to JavaScript for you, and you don't have to do it yourself?" So, that's what they did. It's in beta right now, and they're starting to turn it on on specific screens, and see like I mean, it's a setting screen. It's not, you know, it's This isn't like the most complicated stuff. It's a form with a bunch of checkboxes and text inputs. And so, the idea is, can we just make that happen automatically? And I feel like that's kind of what I think people wanted to see from WordPress from the getting. And, you know, WooCommerce is generally kind of ahead of WordPress, and we're always trying to like make those try out those decisions in WooCommerce and see. And so, uh it's pretty cool. I mean, I think for the user, it's like, "Okay, my setting screen looks a little bit nicer." I don't know, you know, I don't know if it's a huge benefit, but I think if we can get all of WordPress just looking nice and cohesive, and all of your, you know, we had some plugins try it, and, you know, they were like, "Well, now my settings just looks like everybody else's settings. I used to have, you know, like icons and things and stuff." And we're kind of like, "Well, I think that's what the user wants. I think they just want it all to look the same and consistent and stuff." And so, I think uh we'll we'll lean into that, and we'll still provide some like escape hatches where you can customize it as well. >> I like that because, yeah, I mean, the consistent user experience has always been a problem for WordPress. So, you know, I go into Gravity Forms, and it looks completely different than when I go into WooCommerce, or when I go into LearnDash, or whatever. All these things have their own UI to them. And so, to kind of bring all that together, and within WooCommerce itself, I mean some extensions look different. So, that's you know, I I I can imagine for the shop owner that isn't, you know, an expert developer, it could be kind of intimidating cuz why does this setting screen look completely different than this other one when it's all part of WooCommerce, even though, you know, we know it's it's technically separate. Um what else is is going on? I know you you have some uh experimental features and things like that. Maybe you might want to show us. >> Yeah, I can pull open I have a little demo store. Okay, I have a couple demo stores cuz I have I have I have a lot of Woo demo stores to try things out. This one um I'm going to show the front end real quick. This is a a demo store of Woo. It's got fake products. It's got um our design team actually like helped like come up with a bunch of fake products. It looks like an apparel store. Um 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. Um but otherwise, we have storefront, the theme that's existed for I think like a decade, I think. And it's yeah, classic classic. So, this one is a block theme um which is in its finishing touches right now. But what's really nice about it is as because all of 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 setting screens and like stuff. Everything's in the block editor. Um 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. Um 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 uh drop-down for logged-in users to like manage all of their settings. Um you get the nice fancy uh 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 um 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 you the different types of product that you're looking for, uh 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 Woo core. 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 um 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. Um they're really they convert really well, they're really streamlined, they they're really performant. Um but, if you're doing something really crazy with WooCommerce, then it might not have the extensibility, and you might be using the old shortcodes, which in WooCommerce you can always use the old shortcodes, you can always use the old approach for anything. Um but, I'm really excited for this block theme cuz I'm just like I feel like people constantly are building things that we already offer in the blocks, like product carousels and uh product um galleries and lightboxes 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. >> Yeah, that's really nice looking. I I I like that it is kind of you know, it's it's got all your your functionality, and then you really can't it's like a blank canvas, you can sort of just make it your own after that. >> Yeah, and it's the checkout itself is pretty um set, but it's very like I think people have set on like a standard way that checkouts look. I think like obviously with Shopify you can't customize your checkout at all. Your checkout is hosted by Shopify separately. You can pay I think it's like if you go on like the $1,000 a month plan or something, you can add CSS to it. That's you know, the the big upsell there. But with ours like I think if I I don't know. Let's open up the site editor, but like it's all blocks. So I can go in and I can change things just in a block editor. I don't need a developer for it. Um I can move things around. Where do I want my extensions to show up? Um I got to do the little like There's a little thing that like shows you the template. I can never find this stuff. Just go to the checkout page. >> There we go. >> Oh, you know, I was probably supposed to edit the edit the page, edit the template. This is my least favorite thing about uh WordPress site editing. There's some really good experiments to clean this up. Um like when am I editing a template? When am I editing a page? Um But yeah, once you go inside like I'll open up the list view just so you can see all of the blocks, but like literally everything is a block. So then you just get full access. Some of it's a little locked down. You can't tweak it too much. That's why some people still stick with like the old checkout, but the block checkout is pretty good and gives you a ton of things like custom designs, if you want a dark mode to match your theme, do you need to change the colors, tweak the settings, all that sort of stuff. So overall I've been a pretty big fan of like the block-based approach, um but it's I feel like it's just not used as much as I would like it to be. >> Yeah, that's something I've noticed like I have a lot of older WooCommerce sites that I still manage, and of course all the shortcode stuff is still in there. But on the newer sites I've built, I really like the approach of the blocks. I think it's just cleaner. It looks more modern, um and it's not so radically different that the user wouldn't be able to navigate it. So, I think that's it's probably worth the the time few minutes you'd spend to convert it over to blocks in my opinion. >> Yeah, it's definitely I mean, like I said, it definitely performs better in terms of conversion rate. I think just because we can really control how fast it shows up. It's just if you're using a lot of extensions, this is like a demo, but it shows you this little thing if you have extensions that don't support the checkout, it'll let you know. This is just a fake one, but just to kind of show on a demo store. Um but the like block stuff kind of extends to everything. Like if I open the product catalog, um it's the same thing where everything is blocks. And so, if you're really want a very specific design of how people can browse your shop page, even to like the filters on the side, you can fully change them and move them around. You can change their like design and stuff. You can change their colors. So, if you don't want checkboxes, you want little chips, or you want, you know, all the sort of different design elements. Like you have full access to it, and it's basically like any other WordPress thing, or maybe I don't want to show the price. Maybe I don't want to show the sale badge. Like I don't need to get a developer to do this stuff. I can just change all of that stuff myself and just have full control over it. And I feel like uh that's another piece that's like a little bit of a hidden value of the block themes. >> I can remember the days of just adding a lot of hooks and filters and trying to tap into those things to get rid of what I didn't want and add a few extra things that I did. I can remember just even adding, you know, like a little message to the cart page could be a little bit of a hassle in certain situations. So, that's kind of cool. You could just add a block with what you need, and you could probably even use like a something like block visibility to you know, change it. Maybe you're only showing it on mobile. Maybe you're only showing it to logged-in users, those type of things. >> Yeah, one of the things we're testing right now is somebody built with AI of course an automated thing that pulls all of our blocks and WordPress 7.1 is going to have responsive styles. So, if you want to change the padding or the spacing or anything like on mobile, tablet, etc. So, somebody went through all of our WooCommerce blocks and had AI test every single thing to determine if there was any just weird spots because I mean we have a I think there's like over 100 blocks. It takes a lot of blocks to build a WooCommerce store. Um they've been built over years and years and years. So, they went through and tested and there was like maybe half a dozen spots where we need to fix a thing. But yeah, like because because it's blocks, because WordPress is introducing responsive design controls in the next version, you will have full access to responsive design controls in all the blocks. And so, I think that's another benefit is like as long as we keep building on core, if core does something special like responsive design, which I think we've all been waiting a very long time for, um this is it's just going to come free in WooCommerce. So, you're going to have access to that. So, if you want to do your product pages really special on mobile or something like that, um you know, you can just do it. >> Yeah, yeah. I do I just want to plug that we just published an episode with Anne McCarthy who's the release lead for WordPress 7.1 where she shows us about how to use those responsive styles. So, go check that out if you haven't already. So, that that's really cool that yeah, we we're getting some responsive controls in WordPress and that trickles down to Woo. Um so, I know like you're always talking about AI, right? You're you're a big AI person. Matt we know is a big AI person. What kind of things are are you guys doing with AI in WooCommerce these days? >> Um yeah, so I I don't I probably should have asked what I'm allowed to say. I think if you come to a US, you will definitely hear about WooCommerce AI. I will say that. The there's there's really like two aspects Actually, there's probably three aspects to AI in WooCommerce. So, the first one is can I just connect Claude to my Can I like take my existing chatbot and connect it to WooCommerce? And in the past, you could do that anyway with, you know, WP-CLI or a REST API. If you tell If you tell Claude to go do something to your site and it can get in the REST API, it's going to do it. Like it it doesn't care. It'll figure that stuff out. Um so, there's that, but I think the next step of that is the WordPress MCP. So, WooCommerce already added support for the WordPress MCP. So, there's a lot of abilities to like read your products, read your orders, get information out of the site, less for editing your site that we're still don't feel like that's a safe enough thing to do yet for people cuz we really don't want to break sites. So, MCP I always think of it as like training wheels AI connection. Um but we also extended that to all of our extensions. So, if you have subscriptions, if you have memberships, um which SkyVerge works on, if you have some of these other extensions, they are also showing abilities, so those will show up in there. Um and so, that's the first thing, which is like can can I go to my existing chatbot and do some store management stuff. Um The second one is well, can I see some AI stuff inside of my dashboard? That is the one where all I can I don't know what I can say. I probably should have asked. It's Yes, there there's some very cool stuff and I'm I believe the plan is to demo and start doing beta testing um at WorkCamp US. Um so, I didn't get permission to show it, but I will say that chatting with an agent and doing stuff inside of WooCommerce, it's it exists. And I think the other piece about it is not just like, "Hey, go add some products, go change some stuff." It's more like, "Hey, you have access to like years of my data. Can you do in-depth analysis on what are where are the customers that are churning? Where do the products that are not selling as good as they used to? What are you know, it's those sorts of deeper analytical questions and that's what they focused on with it. So the real focus is can AI spin up these sort of like dashboards and things like that and give me like the deeper insights to managing my store. Um, so that one's coming and the third area is can people in the world use AI to buy from my store? And that's what they call agentic commerce. So like I said last week I was at Stripe for an agentic commerce event and I got I was in a discussion with um, a few other merchants and the whole room was filled with people from eBay and Walmart and Amazon and lots of big stores. Um, and we basically talked about what what is that going to look like? It looks like there's going to be some protocols that kind of go through um, Stripe and Google are leading the charge. And so we do have experimental support for those so that you somebody could actually buy something in a chatbot from your store. Um, but the down the the the caveat there is that's a cool future idea, but it's not really happening in the world today. I think there's been like some tiny percentage of actual conversions and stuff, but it's not a a real thing that's happening very much. Users aren't really ready for that, but I think it is something that we're we're just going to have to prepare for. And so we do have the protocols set up and we're kind of just waiting on the protocols themselves to stabilize and for us to feel like, yes, this is something that's actually going to happen. And that that process is just a conversation with Stripe and Google and all these other partners as we keep tweaking and we keep you know, figuring out all the gaps because stores are complicated. >> Yeah, that's going to be an interesting process. I I I wonder how that's going to work. Like am I going to be in chat GPT and I want to buy a new hat. And maybe it shows me a selection of hats from different stores and I pick one from your store and does it already have my payment information with chat GPT or do I have to enter re-enter it for your store? You know, how does how does that connection work? That'll be kind of fascinating to see where that goes. >> Yeah, the the the the idea they were talking about was, "Oh, I have I think it was like my kids having a birthday party and this is the theme. Go find all the supplies for it." So, the agent is autonomously going out, finding all the supplies you need for this party, the decorations, and all these things from different stores, and compiling a list, and getting approval to go off and purchase all these things for you. And of course, the questions are immediately like, "Well, what happens if I don't like it and I want to return it? Who handles that? Who gives me the refund? Who How do I know the customer support? How do I know that they bought from a reputable place? How do I know what the shipping is going to be and the tax?" And all these sorts of things. So, there's tons and tons of questions, but like I feel like I've learned over the last year to not underestimate AI. Like I It feels like anytime I'm like, "It won't do that." It does it. So, I'm sure 5 years from now that won't seem so far-fetched, but the work is like the fact that the work is already happening is is kind of crazy. >> Well, I wanted to go back to you you had written a blog post about MCP MCP servers and you were using an example I believe of your wife's website where you were like using it to basically find out the cost of goods, the cost of making things. That seems so far out to me when you wrote it, I believe it was like last year. And now this is like a thing people are doing, right? So, that moved really fast. I I mean, I I can imagine people, you know, very soon doing that with their WooCommerce stores in a big way. Yeah, I mean I think that's going to be I think there's a few things. One is like like AI is really good at building on top of WordPress and WooCommerce. And it's if you're running a store and you need a simple thing that you might have reached a SAS for, but now you're like, well, can you just build a new screen on my dashboard that does that cuz it already has access to everything? I think that's going to be more and more common. People are going to be doing that because all the building blocks are already there. All the you know, there's a database and there's post types and there's all these things that it can pull in and use to do all that. Um So I think we'll see a lot more of that in the future as long as um as long as AI keeps continuing. And then yeah, I think the the next piece will be um how much do I trust AI, >> [laughter] >> you know, on my live store? And so I think that's the other part that we're sort of grappling with which is, well, should you know, are staging environments enough? Are local environments enough? You know, we have uh in automatic we have something called studio which is a local development tool. Um and it has its own sort of agent inside of it and it's even there we're having the discussion, well, should it pull your site locally? Should we let studio edit your live site? And you know, all that sort of stuff. So I think all those things are going to be worked out. Um so I think if you're a developer, you have a a huge head start here, but I wouldn't be surprised if we start seeing tools like studio where it's like, all right, I'll just make a copy of your site and then I won't have to worry about breaking anything. Well, we can experiment, we can iterate and then boom, I can deploy it back to you and you can have some new thing that calculates exactly the information that you want in the way that you want it with all of your real life data and you're not paying, you know, some SAS provider. I think it's it's definitely going to change the dynamics for sure. >> Yeah, playground seems like the perfect tool for something like that. >> Yeah, playground is um something I I feel like I use constantly. The hard part with playground and WooCommerce is WooCommerce stores are massive. So, the the the if you want the real data, so like this store, this is a demo store, but the way we set it up um is when you spin up the demo store, it populates actual real orders and stuff. So, in the background, it pretends like you have tons and tons of orders and sales and stuff because we need that information to really test things. You can't just test on like an empty store. That's where playground is a little bit I've been trying to figure out a way to get this demo store so people can use it, but it's the value comes from the fact that it's really massive. So, that's why I'm I'm excited about Studio as like a good local development tool. It also is getting really good with WooCommerce. It's getting really good with like its own agentic stuff built in. And so, we'll definitely see I think you know, we'll see a lot of stuff coming out of Studio pretty soon. >> Yeah, it's exciting. Uh anything else that that we should know about coming in the next few months? >> Um yeah, I would say I mean, I'll show this one just cuz I'm here. You had mentioned moving all of our settings pages to the new sort of fancy modern WordPress. This is an experiment you can turn on which does the same for your product page. So, or your product catalog. So, you can manage your product catalog with this much like faster. You can tell it's a little bit There's still some like rough edges in it, but it does things like letting you select multiple products and doing like a bulk edit in line with a nice sidebar so you can you know, change status and stock and price and all that sort of stuff in line, but it also has a really good search and filter through your variable products. This is the part I like. So, if I wanted to find all of my like green sweaters, I could just search and it'll actually pull out the individual variations and then I can bulk at it those. Um I think that sort of stuff is going to be really handy. I think you know, as much as we use AI for a lot of these things, there's just times where you need to log into your store and you need to look at the actual data and you need to know that it's doing exactly what you want. I don't think that's going to go away. Um so even though this is sort of the opposite of AI, I think this is also another place where we're going to see a lot of improvements. Um again, this is experimental the new product view, but uh I'm a huge fan of the way it just breaks your variations apart, the way it lets you do these sorts of bulk edits. Um >> Absolutely. >> I'm hoping to see this one come out of beta sometime soon. >> Now how just think just thinking off the top of my head, how might this this uh impact uh the Woo Analytics? Cuz I mean you have some really handy reports in there, but I do find myself at times looking at it and saying, well, wouldn't it be nice if I could get this data or that data? Maybe that that has to be a great AI tie-in eventually. >> Yeah, so Woo Analytics is another one of those like stuck in one foot in each room situations, cuz there's kind of I think the old one is the Woo Reports section of your dashboard. Um but now there's the Woo Analytics section. Um I think you know, I know that you know, I know for most stores over a certain size or something like that, they're probably not using this and they're probably using like uh like Metric, I think, is like a popular one. Um especially ones that can offload it. Um if you use Jetpack, that's kind of helpful too, because it they can offload a lot of that work to separate servers and things like that. Um Woo Analytics is a little more like run it in your store. There's been a I mean, AI has helped it a ton because we've been able to do a lot of optimizations to it, like moving things into scheduled actions and stuff so that these numbers can update more dynamically but not also slow your site down when you have you know need to crunch a bunch of numbers and stuff. But I will say the the AI piece on top of it like is really really like deeply understanding the metrics of your store is a big part of what they're focusing on. There's also another experiment I can send a link on our dev blog where somebody built a cloud extension for WooCommerce where you can it has a bunch of other sort of experiments. That's a good one to look at because a lot of that kind of informed where the final product is going to go but it's the same thing where it's like if I can take all this data and I can spit it out of my site into Claude or whatever you know LLM I use in a structured way, it can definitely crunch numbers a lot faster than me looking at charts and graphs that I don't have a lot of control over. So I think that's where you're going to see a lot of that stuff happen. >> This is this is uh an exciting time for Woo. So Brian, I I thank you for for sharing everything with us here. Uh where can folks uh connect with you online? >> Yeah, so our central place for my team is developer.woo.com which is the Woo developer blog. We have a newsletter. We have a community Slack with I think like 40,000 members that you're free to join. Um we have uh we're on Twitter and Blue Sky. Uh we do a little bit on YouTube as well but the developer blog is kind of the home place to get all of the links to all of that stuff, all the documentation. Um and I at bare minimum recommend subscribing to the newsletter cuz it's just once a month and it's just the high level stuff that's most important. And then we will also be at WordCamp US and myself and actually um another developer advocate, Shawnee, we're both presenting at WordCamp US. So um my talk will be a little more about block themes but hers will be more about um agent to commerce. Um so I definitely recommend finding us at WordCamp US, finding us in our Woo booth, and uh developer.woo.com. >> Awesome. Well, thank you for for joining us. We're going to stop the recording here, um but I want to encourage everyone to go visit us over at the wpminute.com/subscribe, grab our newsletter, become a member, support the work that we do here at the WP Minute. Thanks, folks, and we will see you again next time., What’s New With Woo?, YouTube, 01m0svye9xa6kd37d7tmty1rz3.