Everything we’ve shipped this year, and everything still on the roadmap, is building toward a new modern Full Site Editing toolset. Completing that toolset is fundamental to delivering WooCommerce (and other 3rd party plugin) customisation with the minimum of integration code.
Here’s how each update provides the foundational layers of this new FSE and how it will support and deliver WooCommerce development.
What a Complete FSE Toolset Actually Requires
When we set out our FSE approach, the goal was never to tick off block editor features one at a time. It was to build a toolset where you can construct anything, style anything, and control how changes are made and by whom, all without leaving the GeneratePress ecosystem.
That requires two kinds of work: filling in the missing fundamental elements and building the higher-level layers that sit on top of them. Miss either and you end up with a toolset that looks complete but hits a wall the moment you try to do something the original design didn’t anticipate.
What We’ve Delivered
It’s been just over 3 months since we released the results of the 2026 customer survey, since then. We have released 3 important features.
Forms. A fundamental gap in our FSE offering, and a highly requested feature from users. Building it also meant establishing how self-closing form elements behave in the editor and how front-end submissions are handled. That’s foundational wiring, and nothing that involves dynamic, user-facing components can be built without it.
CSS Editor. This removed the artificial ceiling on our styles builder UI. Users had been asking for more flexibility, and it gave us a styling layer with no hard limits on what it can target, including markup from 3rd party sources.
Editor Access. This solved the biggest pain point for our agency and freelancer users: controlling what clients can and can’t touch. With it came the tooling to build custom control sets and apply them conditionally based on user, post type, blocks, or attributes. It’s a super powerful tool that extended our core capabilities for constructing dynamic interfaces.
Each of these closed a real gap users asked us to address. Each of them also happens to be a purposefully designed layer that our FSE vision depends on.
The Next Level Layers: What’s Coming Soon
Next up in our release schedule are two major pieces of the FSE project: the ultimate update to Global Styles and new, improved theme templating.
GB Pro 2.8 brings Global Styles upgrades and new Design Tokens into a shared design workspace. Global Styles will support non-class-based selectors, including raw HTML tags for theme-level styling. Design Tokens adds the final piece to the styles builder with CSS variables. The shared workspace will deliver real-time site previews, categories, sorting, and filtering to help you build and manage your own custom design system with ease.
GP Premium 3.0 is a major milestone for the GeneratePress Themes premium plugin and full site editing. This update will deliver a reinvention of the Elements module. This new feature, named Template Engine, will use modern technology to provide 100% block-built sites that load faster and with greater freedom than either Elements or Block themes can. It will also deliver many Element-related feature requests and a simple, non-destructive upgrade path.
GB Pro 2.8 will launch imminently with GP Premium 3.0 hot on its heels.
Later in the year, we plan to add Query Building and front-end filtering as the final major layer to the FSE project. We will have more details to share soon.
Why This Is The WooCommerce Answer
Once those layers exist, WooCommerce stops being such a special case. And whilst we work towards them, we are actively researching and developing better support for WooCommerce-dedicated features, from the support of core blocks and embracing them in our styles builder to designing supplementary dynamic tags or blocks where necessary.
The alternative was always available to us: write hardcoded, WooCommerce-specific code to bolt shop functionality onto our plugins. It’s possibly faster to ship, and it demos well. It’s also a liability. Every WooCommerce release becomes a compatibility risk, every edge case becomes ours to service, and the maintenance cost eventually outweighs whatever the feature delivered in the first place.
A complete FSE toolset shifts that position entirely. Firstly, Global Styles and Design Tokens will deliver bespoke WooCommerce styles, managed from a central place. Template Engine will output replacement single product and shop archive templates. Query builder will generate custom product lists with frontend filters.
What’s left is a much thinner layer of genuinely WooCommerce-specific code, sitting on top of general-purpose tools that empower all types of site building, not just WooCommerce. That’s the difference between customisation you control and integration we have to maintain forever.
A Quick Update On AI
Not a week goes past without agents, chatbots, LLMs, MCP, and generally anything AI making the headlines. For some, it is the most important feature update they expect from GeneratePress. For others, it is the last thing they are interested in and don’t want it near their codebase. AI is definitely a topic to divide a room. Well, there is good news for both sides: we are in the pre-alpha development stages of a dedicated AI toolset, and it will be 100% optional. Watch this space, as we have a release announcement coming real soon.
Cool.
This is what I’ve been waiting for!! IT’S HAPPENING!!
All I’ve been asking for is the ability to assign a template to all children pages of a page like most other advanced themes can do. Hoping that is included! But very excited to see this new update!