Darren Ethier

Hi Antony 👋,

Disclaimer: I’m not making this comment in an “official” capacity but simply as an individual contributor to the WooCommerce project and filtered through my years of experience in the WordPress community as a freelance developer and some recent experience as an employee of Automattic.

I work on the WooCommerce Blocks team, so your comment caught my eye. You assessment of the current state of Woo Blocks extensibility is pretty spot on, and it’s something we are aware of. However, one exception is that this is something we think about.

What we’re trying to navigate and explore is how we can introduce, or retain, the same flexibility and extensibility developers have been accustomed to in the past while also embracing some of the new direction and paradigms Gutenberg and blocks bring to the world of WordPress. We’re reluctant to just add filters and actions everywhere because we’re not sure yet that will be the best way to make blocks extensible and resilient.

We’re also constantly reminding ourselves of the promise blocks hold for the ability of merchants to more easily customize and edit their stores than ever before. I mean, I’ve worked with WordPress shortcodes and templates for years and year and while I don’t dispute the incredible flexibility they brought to customizing and building sites, the user experience for new users to WordPress has been degrading as other companies have worked on improving this user experience. Gutenberg holds the potential to reverse that degradation for WordPress and in turn the WordPress ecosystem.

hell storefront doesn’t even use them which I think tells you everything you need to know

Storefront is currently in maintenance mode. What that means is we are ensuring all our blocks work well with Storefront, and that Storefront continues to work well with the recent versions of WordPress and WooCommerce, we’re not actively adding new features to Storefront. Themes is another area we’re exploring this year – especially in relation to the direction block theming seems to be going (we’re learning and observing too!).

I think the important thing to keep in mind with all these changes is that nothing is going to be ideal overnight (an impossible task). So it can be frustrating when we’re in the transitory state between the way things were always done in the past to some newer ways of doing things in the future. However, it also presents an incredible opportunity for those who recognize it, to help contribute to and shape what this ideal state may be. Articles like Justin’s are read and discussed. Comments and feedback in the WordPress forums are noticed. Github issues and pull requests (and comments in the respective places) are noted. Experiments by community members exploring what the block editor is capable of are learned from. How people use WordPress (or WooCommerce!) to build things is observed.

The links between all those things and the impact in the codebase and direction isn’t always obvious, but it is there.

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