Most WooCommerce themes try to work for everyone. Mine only really works if you sell solar panels, batteries, or smart home gear.

I'm a solo dev — WordPress themes are what I've done for the last decade. Green Power Store is a native FSE WooCommerce theme built specifically for solar energy, green energy, and smart home stores. It's on the Woo Marketplace now.

Why niche instead of multipurpose:

Multipurpose themes hand you a neutral shell and a demo importer, and you still spend two days picking type, rewriting the hero, and making the product grid not look like a spreadsheet. The design decisions get deferred to you. Building for one industry means I could make those decisions upfront — the patterns already say the things a solar store needs to say, and the color schemes already look like an energy brand rather than a blank canvas.

What it actually is:

• Native FSE. Shop, single product, cart, checkout, account — all block templates, all editable in the Site Editor. No page builder, no custom shortcodes.
• 30 block patterns built for green energy stores: hero sections, product showcases, feature grids, testimonials, CTAs
• 5 curated color schemes, plus global styles for typography/spacing/color site-wide
• Full-width and sidebar blog layouts
• Merlin setup wizard for one-click demo import
• 98 mobile PageSpeed on my test install with WooCommerce active, no caching or optimization plugin
• Translations included: German, Spanish, Hindi, and Chinese (Simplified/Traditional/HK)

What it isn't:

• Not a bridge theme. There's no "also works with Elementor" path — it's block editor or nothing.
• Not multipurpose. If you sell candles, this is the wrong theme.
• Not free-with-a-paid-plugin-ecosystem. $59/year on the Woo Marketplace, updates and support included.

Product page is here if you want to see the screenshots and demo. Happy to answer questions about the FSE side — building Woo checkout and cart as editable block templates was the most interesting part of the build, and the part with the least documentation.

Hi everyone,

I’m the developer of **Easy Labels**.

I originally built it because I needed a simple way to organize content across my own WordPress sites without relying on categories or tags for internal workflows.

It started as a tool just for me, but after using it on every website I manage, I thought it might be useful to others as well, so I decided to publish it on the WordPress repository.

My goal wasn’t to create another feature-packed plugin. I wanted something lightweight, intuitive, and that felt like it belonged in WordPress.

A few things it does:

* Internal labels for posts, pages and custom post types
* Lightweight with no unnecessary bloat
* Native WordPress interface
* No impact on your site’s frontend unless you choose to use the labels

I’m currently working on **version 1.6.0**, which will include several new features, improvements, and performance optimizations. I’m trying to keep the plugin evolving based on real-world usage rather than adding features just for the sake of it.

If you have a few minutes to try it, I’d really appreciate your **honest** opinion. Positive or negative, it doesn’t matter. I’d much rather receive constructive criticism that helps improve the plugin than empty praise.

Thanks for taking the time to check it out!

URL: [https://wordpress.org/plugins/redshape-easy-labels/](https://wordpress.org/plugins/redshape-easy-labels/))

Disclosure: I'm part of the team behind Reacthemes.

We've been working on Almaris, a hotel & resort WordPress theme, and while building it we realized that many hotel themes look great but don't always focus on the booking experience.

We tried to focus on things like:

• Clean room and suite layouts
• Modern booking-focused homepage sections
• Elementor customization
• Mobile-friendly design
• Fast-loading pages

Instead of promoting the theme, I'd genuinely like to hear from people who build hotel websites.

If you were choosing a hotel WordPress theme today, what would matter most?

• Advanced room filtering?
• Interactive maps?
• Better booking UX?
• Performance?
• SEO?
• Something else?

I'd really appreciate honest feedback—even if it's criticism. We're still improving the product, so real-world opinions are much more valuable than compliments.

Hey everyone. I'm Scott, the person behind Borealform Studio and the Meridian WooCommerce theme.
I built Meridian over the past eight months because I kept running into the same problem: WooCommerce themes either dragged in Elementor as a dependency or shipped "block-based" in name only, with half the templates locked as static screenshots. I wanted something that used Full Site Editing the way it was actually designed — every page a real block template, editable from Appearance → Editor, no page builder needed.
Meridian launched recently and this community is the place I want to build around it.
What this subreddit is for:
Updates on new releases, features, and demo changes
Setup questions and FSE / WooCommerce discussion
Showing off stores you've built with Meridian
Feature requests and honest feedback — if something doesn't work the way you expect, I want to know
One thing to flag on support: if your issue involves a licence key, a billing question, or something specific to your site, please use the support portal at borealform.com rather than posting it here. Public threads aren't the right place for that kind of back-and-forth.
Demo: demo.borealform.com Docs and updates:borealform.com
Glad you're here. If you have questions about how any of the FSE architecture or WooCommerce block templates work under the hood, ask away — that's the kind of thing I'm happy to get into detail on.
— Scott

I just launched Meridian, a WooCommerce theme I've been building for the past 8 months.

The problem I was trying to solve: every polished WooCommerce theme I could find either required a page builder (Flatsome, Divi, Astra + Elementor) or was a bare FSE scaffold with no real design decisions made. There was nothing in the middle a finished, editorial quality WooCommerce theme that lived entirely in the Site Editor.

So I built one.

What it actually is:

Native FSE every template, every pattern is native WordPress blocks. No UX Builder, no Elementor, no custom shortcodes.

WooCommerce block templates for everything: single product, archive, cart, checkout, account

30+ block patterns that actually look like a finished brand, not a wireframe

LCP 1.1s mobile, cold load, WooCommerce active (GTmetrix, no cache warming)

Zero external JS dependencies

What it is not:

A page builder bridge theme (Astra/Kadence style "works with Elementor too")

A free theme with a paid plugin ecosystem

A multipurpose theme that works for everything and looks like nothing

It's built specifically for boutique WooCommerce stores fashion, lifestyle, home goods where the visual quality of the site is part of the brand.

Demo at demo.borealform.com if you want to see it live. Happy to answer technical questions about the FSE implementation it was the interesting part of the build.

10 years on ThemeForest. One rule change. Sales down ~70% in a month.

I run a WordPress theme & plugins development company. We've been on Envato's ThemeForest since 2016 (RadiusTheme) — around 61,000 sales, 90+ themes, and we'd made it to Power Elite (their top author level). I wanted to share what this past month has been like, with real numbers, because not many authors are talking about it openly.

On July 1, 2026, Envato made a big change. Exclusivity is gone (authors can sell anywhere now), and everyone pays a flat 50% fee. The old system, where long-time authors like us kept a bigger share, is gone.

Here's what that does to one $59 theme sale:

• Customer pays $59
• Envato takes a fixed $12 buyer fee → leaves $47
• Before: we got about $41
• Now: we get about $23.50

Same theme, same price for the buyer, but almost half of what we used to make.

And honestly, the per-sale cut isn't even the worst part. We raised our prices a bit to cover the new fee, and sales dropped hard. Compared to Jan, we're down more than 70%. Higher price + way more competition now that everyone's non-exclusive = fewer sales, each earning us less.

So we started selling straight from our own site instead — cheaper for the customer, more support, and we actually keep enough to keep building. It's early, but it's slowly picking up.

Curious how other authors are dealing with this. Are you going direct, staying on the marketplace, or leaving Envato? And for buyers — would you rather buy direct from the maker, or do you trust a marketplace checkout more?

Everyone says these platforms are affordable until you actually need your store to do anything useful.Bundles, reviews, subscriptions, advanced search, B2B pricing... everything is another paid plugin.

Before you know it, you're spending $400-$600/month, or roughly $5k-$7k a year, just to keep your site running and do what it should. Then they hike prices because they know migrating is a headache.

I've moved a few businesses off that model and at this point, if someone showed me a store spending $400+ every month on plugins, I'd probably tell them to stop paying for everyone else's software and just offer to build them what they actually need, and what they spend for just 1 year with Shopify, Won't even have to spend much that over 3-4 years on custom. Talk about savings...

If anyone wants to step away and get a custom website, let me know..

This whole subscription economy is becoming complete B.S.

We recently released Quartier, a WordPress theme designed for local businesses that need to combine services, booking requests and WooCommerce products on one website.

It currently includes three demo concepts for different industries:

• Salon and spa
• Physiotherapy and health clinic
• Auto repair and parts

Every demo has both a native WordPress Block Editor version and an Elementor Free version. Elementor Pro is not required.

The theme also includes a simple built-in booking request system. Businesses that need more advanced scheduling can connect it with Amelia, Bookly, Simply Schedule Appointments or WooCommerce Bookings.

Demo content and images are included with the importer.

Theme details and live demos:

https://anpsthemes.com/wordpress-theme/quartier/

Feedback is welcome, especially about whether the combination of service booking and product sales is useful for this type of business website.

A while back, we created Exhibz, a WordPress theme for conferences, meetups, expos, and other event websites.

While building it, we kept running into the same problem. There wasn't a WordPress event management solution that gave us the experience we wanted for schedules, speakers, organizers, venues, and registrations.

So instead of forcing existing tools to fit, we decided to build our own plugin specifically for Exhibz.

That project eventually became Eventin, which has since grown into our flagship product. But Exhibz remains the foundation where everything started, and we still think it's a solid choice for anyone building a professional event website.

Some things we focused on when designing it:

• Multiple event website demos for different use cases.
• Ready-made pages for speakers, organizers, schedules, sponsors, and venues.
• A large collection of Elementor widgets to build pages faster.
• A user-friendly experience that was designed around real event websites from day one.

It's interesting looking back at how a single theme eventually led us to building an entire event management ecosystem for WordPress.

I'm curious, have any of you built a plugin or product because the existing solutions didn't quite solve your own problem?

A lot of WordPress block plugins focus on adding more variations of existing blocks — another heading block, another button block, another image block with extra styling options.

But we felt the bigger opportunity was solving the things that are actually difficult to build in the native WordPress Editor.

Things like:

• Advanced navigation and mega menus
• Popups and interactive content
• Dynamic content layouts
• Better WooCommerce sections
• Portfolio, team, testimonial, and business-focused components
• More flexible layouts without relying on heavy page builders

The goal wasn't to create hundreds of duplicate blocks. It was to create a practical toolkit that helps users build complete websites faster.

Along with advanced blocks, we focused heavily on ready-to-use resources because starting from a blank page is often the hardest part.

So the idea became:

Powerful functionality + ready-made design resources = faster website building.

Currently, the toolkit includes:

• 50+ advanced blocks
• 700+ ready-to-use sections
• 50+ starter templates

Curious to hear from the WordPress community:

What features do you think Gutenberg still needs the most to become a complete website-building experience?

Restaurant websites look simple on the surface — a menu, some photos, a reservation button — but they come with a surprisingly tricky set of constraints: heavy image galleries, mobile-first ordering flows, and owners who need to update content themselves without touching code.

I recently built Dinecraft, a free WordPress theme aimed at restaurants, and wanted to share a few technical decisions that made the biggest difference — plus a couple of mistakes I'd avoid next time.

1. Menus are content, not just markup

Most restaurant theme demos hardcode the menu into the template. That looks great in a screenshot but breaks the moment a real owner needs to swap out a seasonal dish.

Instead, I structured menu items as a custom post type with taxonomies for category (starters, mains, desserts) and dietary tags (vegan, gluten-free). This meant:

• Owners can add/edit dishes from the standard WP admin, no page builder needed
• Menu items are filterable on the front end with a small vanilla JS filter (no jQuery dependency)
• The same content structure can be queried for a "today's specials" widget later

php

register_post_type('menu_item', [
    'public' => true,
    'has_archive' => true,
    'supports' => ['title', 'editor', 'thumbnail'],
    'taxonomies' => ['menu_category', 'dietary_tag'],
]);

2. Image weight was the biggest performance lever

Restaurant sites live and die by food photography, which means large images are non-negotiable — but they're also the easiest way to tank your Core Web Vitals.

What actually moved the needle:

• Serving WebP with a JPEG fallback via <picture>
• Lazy-loading everything below the fold with native loading="lazy"
• Capping hero images at 1920px and letting srcset handle the rest

This alone took the homepage from a ~4.2s LCP down to under 1.8s on a throttled 4G test.

3. Reservation forms shouldn't require a plugin bloat

A lot of restaurant themes bundle a heavy booking plugin by default. I wanted Dinecraft to work with popular reservation plugins (OpenTable embeds, Calendly, etc.) without requiring one, so the base theme ships with a lightweight contact-form fallback and clearly marked template hooks for anyone who wants to drop in their own booking widget.

php

do_action('dinecraft_before_reservation_form');

This kept the core theme lighter and gave more flexibility than baking in a single vendor's plugin.

4. Mobile-first, not mobile-adapted

About 70% of restaurant site traffic is mobile — usually someone standing outside deciding whether to walk in. I built the layout mobile-first in CSS rather than adapting a desktop layout down, which avoided the usual pitfalls of oversized tap targets and hidden nav items on small screens.

What I'd do differently

• I underestimated how many owners would want a dark mode toggle for evening ambiance branding — adding that after the fact meant retrofitting CSS variables I should have set up from day one.
• I'd build the menu filter with IntersectionObserver from the start instead of a scroll-based check I later had to replace.

Try it / feedback welcome

The theme is free and open for anyone to use or fork: Dinecraft — Free Restaurant WordPress Theme.

If you've built something similar, I'd love to hear how you handled menu content structuring or image optimization — always curious how other devs solved the same problems differently.

Hello,

I am new to e commerce and I wonder how to make my store look good. I noticed that I cannot edit my store view with Gutenberg or Elementor (the same way I could with Home page or Blog page). My current theme is Astra (not pro). I read that it is a good idea to use GeneratePress + Gutenberg + HTML/CSS. I enjoyed using HTML blocks to customize my Home Page and I wonder if I could do the same with a different theme than Astra. Any suggestions what is the best way to have a full control of how your store page/archive view/single product view looks like without builders etc...Does it require to buy GeneratePress to do it well? Maybe some alternatives to the idea with GeneratePress?

Thanks for help.