Earlier this month, the WooCommerce team announced progress on their first official block-based theme, code-named “Purple.” On July 15, they paused the theme’s submission to WordPress.org. Now, they’ve confirmed that the submission has been fully withdrawn as part of a strategic shift in direction.
What Led to the Decision
According to the update, the decision was made after the team identified overlap between Purple and other emerging WordPress block themes under development, as highlighted, “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. 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 revised strategy centers on integrating WooCommerce-tailored patterns, templates, and style options directly into the WooCommerce platform, using a common, WordPress theme as the foundation, as stated, “ Our new direction focuses on providing the best commerce-building experience on top of a shared, modern WordPress theme, delivering WooCommerce specific patterns, templates, and style variations directly within WooCommerce itself”.
This approach does provide the team with several advantages, such as less maintenance, avoiding duplication, and providing merchants with the latest updates.
The team has now officially withdrawn the theme submission from the official WordPress Theme Repository. The GitHub repository will remain accessible to the public, but will not be actively maintained as highlighted, “ The Purple theme repository will remain public for transparency but will not be actively maintained.”
Even though the theme development won’t progress further, the team notes that the work done during this phase has led to improvements in various aspects of WooCommerce, as highlighted, “ The development of the theme drove major improvements in WooCommerce’s core blocks, templates, and extensibility, all shipping steadily to Woo users, regardless of which theme they use.”