Woo published its plans for WordCamp Europe 2026 on the developer blog: Krakow, June 4 to 6 at the ICE Krakow Congress Centre, a community meetup at the Aquarius Restaurant on the Friday night, and a booth in the shared Automattic space. I read these posts backwards. The party details are interchangeable, but the list of topics a vendor invites you to talk about is usually the list it’s working on.
The announcement names the things the team will discuss: checkout blocks, block themes, APIs, docs, MCP, and AI-powered workflows. Developer Advocate Shani Banerjee and Core Product Manager James Kemp will be around, and there’s an email address for booking time. It’s thin as event news, but useful as a statement about where core attention is going.
What the invitation list tells you
The MCP mention interests me more than the rest of the list. Checkout blocks have been the default for new stores since WooCommerce 8.3 in November 2023, so in product terms they’re old news. MCP support is new enough that its implementation has already moved once. The WooCommerce-specific /wp-json/woocommerce/mcp endpoint was removed in WooCommerce 11.3, and the current path runs through the MCP Adapter plugin. If you built against the old endpoint, you learned about that from an admin notice or a changelog entry.
That churn is normal for a new surface, but it’s also why the age of the docs matters. The MCP and Abilities API documentation is still settling, and a short conversation with the people who write it beats an evening of guessing about what’s stable. I’d ask one narrow question: which parts of the current MCP surface would you tell an agency not to build on yet? I wrote about what WooCommerce 10.9 changed about MCP abilities, and the honest conclusion was to check before assuming. A product manager can shorten that from a paragraph to a sentence.
The checkout question I’d bring
Checkout is where I’d spend my booth minutes, because it’s still where older stores get stuck. Sites that have been running for years often still use the shortcode cart and checkout, either because a payment gateway never gained block support or because someone’s custom snippet hooks the old template. The failure is quiet: the block checkout loads fine and lists no payment methods, because the enabled gateway isn’t compatible with it.
Plugin authors have a proper way to state their position on this:
add_action( 'before_woocommerce_init', function() {
if ( class_exists( \Automattic\WooCommerce\Utilities\FeaturesUtil::class ) ) {
\Automattic\WooCommerce\Utilities\FeaturesUtil::declare_compatibility( 'cart_checkout_blocks', __FILE__, true );
}
} );If you maintain stores rather than plugins, the step is simpler. On staging, switch the checkout page to the block version and run a real payment through every gateway the store uses, including the local one nobody thinks about. Finding a dead gateway in staging beats finding it in a Monday morning message. The single-track checkout summit from earlier this year pointed the same direction, so it’s reasonable to expect more movement here.
WordCamp Europe 2026 without the badge
The post includes two channels that work from anywhere: developer-advocacy@woocommerce.com and @DevelopWoo on X. An inbox like that handles specific, narrow questions well and broad architecture reviews badly, so treat it like a decent bug report: versions, what you expected, what happened. You don’t need a ticket to Krakow for that.
The Google for WooCommerce angle at the booth, covering product feeds, ads, and YouTube Shopping, is aimed at merchants, but it maps to a check you can run this week on any store that sells through Google. Open Merchant Center, look at feed status, and see whether disapproved items are stacking up. Feeds break quietly while everyone watches checkout and email. (I doubt a booth conversation fixes a feed, though.)
This week I’d do two things on the store I maintain: confirm the Google feed has no disapproved products, and run the block checkout test on staging before anyone asks to just switch it. Then I’d email the developer advocacy address with the two questions the docs couldn’t answer. If you want a hand with either check, or with planning a block checkout migration on a legacy store, that’s regular work for me.
