Just a month after detailing plans for its first official WooCommerce block theme, Woo has withdrawn its submission to WordPress.org and is pivoting to a new strategy focused on block patterns, templates, and shared theme infrastructure.

The theme, internally codenamed “Purple,” was first announced in December 2024 during a live community call with Ellen Bauer, Woo’s product lead for themes, blocks, and patterns. Billed as a modern, mobile-first replacement for Storefront, it was positioned as both a learning tool for developers and a real-world showcase for what WooCommerce blocks could do.

On July 1, Woo announced the theme was nearly ready. “We’re close to releasing a demo site,” the team wrote at the time, highlighting improvements to core blocks like Product Gallery, Product Image, and Add to Cart. But just two weeks later, an update to the post revealed the submission had been paused while Woo explored merging “two separate themes into one single Woo starter theme.”

That pause became permanent on July 31, when Woo published a new update confirming the theme’s withdrawal and outlining a strategic shift. Instead of releasing a standalone theme, Woo will now deliver commerce-specific patterns, templates, and style variations directly within the WooCommerce plugin, designed to work with a shared modern base theme.

“As we finalized the new theme for WordPress.org, the team realized there was significant overlap between Purple and other emerging WordPress block themes being worked on internally,” the team wrote. “Rather than maintaining multiple, similar themes, we’ve stepped back to consider how we could best serve the Woo and broader WordPress communities for the long haul.”

The Purple theme repository will remain public, but won’t be actively maintained.

The reversal comes after months of steady updates and community enthusiasm. When Storefront launched back in 2014, Woo framed it as a clean, extensible starting point — a theme developers could count on for compatibility with WooCommerce extensions. Built with Underscores, it became the go-to for many agencies and product teams.

That legacy has shaped expectations. “We were quite heavy users of Storefront, as we could be sure that all extensions would be compatible,” wrote Hendrik Luehrsen, CEO of Luehrsen // Heinrich, in Post Status Slack following the announcement. “For us, a default theme is much more than just a fast entry. It’s a showcase of best practices, a common ground to validate against.”

KestralWP co-founder Ian Misner quipped, “We all decided everyone’s just gonna use Ollie and make that the default ecommerce block theme,” nodding to the popular Ollie theme.

In response, Woo Developer Advocate Brian Coords acknowledged the change but emphasized that the effort behind Purple wasn’t wasted. “Most of the work in this project centered on improving the blocks themselves and the workflows for templating,” he wrote. “So you can see that work in the last few releases of Woo core.” He invited developers to share feedback in the Woo Community Slack.

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