Issue #204 Loop WP

Hi, {{first_name|friend}}. 👋

Welcome to Issue #204 of Loop WP!

Last week was about major bugs in WooCommerce Subscriptions that have cost users potentially millions, “if” not more (depending on what you read), in lost revenue.

This week is all about Ollie for WooCommerce! Another beautiful triumph from Mike Alister and Patrick Posner (there are no Ollie affiliate links used in this issue).

Let’s go! 👇

🎉 If you're a regular reader, you'll know Ollie WP is no stranger to this newsletter.

So when Mike announced that Ollie now fully supports WooCommerce, it immediately caught my attention (even though it took me a little while to write about it).

🧠 The WooCommerce support has been in development since the beginning of 2026, and the launch includes a complete suite of designs, templates, blocks, and tools built specifically for store building, all inside the block editor.

One of the first things that stood out to me in the launch video was how Ollie approaches getting you from zero to a working store.

The Setup Wizard, which I already praised in Issue #155, has been extended to cover WooCommerce-specific setup: installing plugins, creating pages, setting up branding, and generating a colour palette.

The whole process is designed to skip a dozen tedious steps and save you hours before you've even made a design decision.

🔥 Then there are Starter Sites.

Rather than stepping through setup manually, you pick a pre-designed WooCommerce store, click import, and within a few seconds, your site is completely transformed, with new styles, pages, and templates all applied at once.

🚀 The result is a complete, ready-to-customise WooCommerce store that looks like it took days to build.

What blew me away was the number of dedicated WooCommerce Patterns available…36 beautiful patterns to get you started!

😎 You check out a demo of all the patterns on the Ollie website.

Every WooCommerce template in Ollie is built with blocks, which means you can visually edit your product page, cart, checkout, and shop grid directly inside the site editor.

Change the product title size, change buttons, swap the related products section for a different pattern, all without touching code.

Some templates even come with built-in design variations. The product archive template, for example, lets you toggle between a standard grid and a grid-with-sidebar layout in one click.

❤️ As usual, Mike has put so much effort and thought into these designs. They are simply beautiful out of the box!

The Product Collection block is the engine behind how products appear across your site: main shop grids, featured items, sale collections, curated picks, and more.

Ollie adds some beautiful things on top of the native WordPress/WooCommerce blocks:

🛒 That last one is particularly handy for landing pages and campaign sections, places where most WooCommerce stores tend to feel rigid and templated.

🔥 The Ollie Pro pattern library now includes a dedicated WooCommerce collection:

❤️ The Menu Designer gets a WooCommerce-specific header design, full mega menu support with product categories and featured items, and mobile menus that actually work properly across devices.

🔥 And for Ollie Pro users, the extensions suite (Animation Designer, Class Manager, SmartSync, Advanced Grid Controls) adds a layer of toolkit-style power that you'd otherwise piece together from separate plugins.

Ollie has always done setup and onboarding well, as we saw in Issue #155.

What this WooCommerce launch does is extend that same philosophy into the one area of WordPress where friction has historically been highest.

💡 I still struggle with the Block Editor, but with every iteration, Ollie is breaking down those barriers, especially for clients. If you've been sitting on the fence about moving a WooCommerce store to the block editor, Ollie is worth a serious look.

The Ollie theme is free on WordPress[dot]org. Ollie Pro, which unlocks everything covered above, starts at $89/year and includes a 14-day money-back guarantee.

✅ If you are using the Block Editor and WooCommerce, you won’t need to look anywhere else when using Ollie Pro, the Ollie Menu Designer and Ollie Extensions.

💡 I’ve got a big announcement for next week’s newsletter, so make sure you tune in.

If you want some context, it’s related to Issue #175.

🎉 Also, a huge congratulations to Rodolfo Melogli for organising the inaugural Checkout Summit.

Make sure you check out Rodolfo’s official roundup.

The buzz online was amazing, and attendees within the community have been sharing their thoughts and recaps:

🚨 If you missed Checkout Summit (like I did ), there’s an online version, Checkout Summit {Reloaded}, coming very soon!

That’s it for this week, {{first_name|friend}}. 👋

This week's excellent and insightful WordPress News & Tips:

If you have a question about this email or WordPress, please reply, and I will respond as soon as possible.

👋 Until next time,