woocommerce/plugins/woocommerce-blocks/docs/internal-developers/templates/README.md

Templates

Table of contents

• Overview
  • Requirements
• Technical Overview
  • The Problem
  • The Solution
  • Some things to be aware of
• Related files

This page includes documentation related to WooCommerce Block Templates.

Overview

WooCommerce Block Templates are a collection of WooCommerce Core templates for the WordPress Full Site Editing experience introduced in WordPress 5.9. You can customize these templates in the Site Editor.

You can read more about the Full Site Editing (FSE) experience here.

Requirements

Software	Minimum Version
WordPress	5.9
WooCommerce	6.0
Theme	Any block theme

Technical Overview

The Problem

Currently, the FSE feature does not accommodate loading block templates from plugins such as WooCommerce (or WooCommerce Blocks). Instead, all template files loaded natively must be present within the active theme's templates folder. When the active block theme doesn't come with WooCommerce specific templates, we want to be able to provide sensible defaults, though.

The Solution

We created a custom solution which involves a handful of files (listed in the below table) that are responsible for both making the templates available as a block template, and rendering it on the front-end.

The BlockTemplateController.php is primarily responsible for hooking into both WordPress core, and WooCommerce core filters to load WooCommerce templates in the Site Editor and on the front-end. It is in this class where the majority of the logic is handled.

Some things to be aware of

• For each template, we have a version represented by a placeholder block and a blockified one, which uses more granular blocks. That was done to keep backwards compatibility for extensions in existing stores.
• At the beginning of the project, we unintentionally used the incorrect WooCommerce plugin slug. This has resulted in us maintaining both the incorrect and correct slugs. We reference these via BlockTemplateUtils::DEPRECATED_PLUGIN_SLUG and BlockTemplateUtils::PLUGIN_SLUG. More information on that here.
• If a theme has a archive-product.html template file, but does not have any taxonomy related files. The archive-product.html template will be applied to all product taxonomy archives. Themes can override product taxonomy archive templates with taxonomy-product_cat.html and taxonomy-product_tag.html templates.

Related files

File	Description	Source	Docs
templates/templates/*	Location in the filesystem where WooCommerce block template HTML files are stored.	Source files
classic-template/*	The JavaScript block rendered in the Site Editor. This is a server-side rendered component which is handled by ClassicTemplate.php	Source file	README
ClassicTemplate.php	Class used to setup the block on the server-side and render the correct template	Source file	README
BlockTemplateController.php	Class which contains all the business logic which loads the templates into the Site Editor or on the front-end through various hooks available in WordPress & WooCommerce core.	Source file	README
BlockTemplateUtils.php	Class containing a collection of useful utility methods.	Source file
BlockTemplatesRegistry.php	Class used as a registry of WooCommerce templates.	Source file
Individual template classes	Individual classes for each WooCommerce template.	Source files	README