A working WooCommerce store selling productized digital documents — built to show how WooCommerce block themes can produce a credible storefront without diving into legacy WC template overrides.
The challenge
WooCommerce’s block-based cart and checkout shipped years ago, but most agencies still build stores on legacy PHP template overrides. The result: stores that look dated, behave inconsistently across devices, and need a developer involved every time the merchant wants to tweak a layout. The Library is a counter-example — a fully block-themed WooCommerce build where the merchant can rearrange the homepage, product grid, and checkout flow in the editor without breaking anything.
The approach
Forge (a child of the platform chassis) supplies the slate-blue + ember palette and the WooCommerce-aware typography. The chassis itself contains the six gotcha-busting CSS rules that the build process surfaced — uneven product card heights, the empty WC notice-banner that inflates the first card in a grid, 4:3 product images getting clipped to 1:1 by WooCommerce’s defaults — and those fixes ship to every demo on the platform automatically.
The custom checkout block (scopeforged-checkout) demonstrates the Additional Checkout Fields API: agency-name and license-tier fields collected at checkout, stored on the order, and reachable by both WooCommerce admins and the merchant via a properly registered REST endpoint.
What’s on the site
- Homepage hero, featured-product collection, value-prop grid, FAQ, CTA — all chassis patterns
- Shop archive with WooCommerce Product Collection block — filters, pagination, equalized card heights
- Per-product pages with image galleries, downloadable-file delivery, and the test-card helper for Stripe sandbox payments
- Block-native cart + checkout running on WooCommerce 9 + WP 6.x
- Custom checkout block (
scopeforged-checkout) collecting agency name + license tier at order time - Stripe test-mode end-to-end (real card numbers fail; the test card helper exposes the right ones)
Outcomes
- Working block-themed WooCommerce store on a $20/mo EC2 box with daily backups + weekly content reset
- Lighthouse 89 / 92 / 100 / 92 on the homepage — including the full WC asset bundle on cart + checkout
- Six WooCommerce CSS gotchas surfaced + fixed in the shared chassis, paid forward to every future demo on the platform
- Custom block authored with
@wordpress/scripts, registered with proper block.json, and rendered with block bindings against post meta — the modern way to write WC extensions