WoodMart 8.6 overview

New Books 2 prebuilt website

Update 8.6 adds a new Books 2 prebuilt website, designed for online bookstores, publishing houses, and digital literary stores. It features a structured, bordered product grid, refined typography, and specialized catalog and product page layouts.

Deep integration with Cart & Checkout blocks

The theme now offers full adaptation and styling for WooCommerce’s modern cart and checkout blocks:

• Marketing features now work in blocks: Free Shipping Bar, Estimate Delivery, Free Gifts, Abandoned Cart notices, and Marketing Consent.
• Styling aligned with theme settings: the cart and checkout blocks now match WoodMart’s theme options: colors, typography, border radius, and other global settings.
• “Saved for Later” block: full support and branded styling for the saved-items block.

Partial demo content import

One of the major additions in WoodMart 8.6 is the Partial Import system, which changes the approach to working with prebuilt demo sites. Instead of a full installation that risks overwriting current settings and cluttering the database with hundreds of unnecessary products and media files, you can now import only the components you need: global style settings (Theme Settings), specific pages (“About Us”, Contact, Home), custom builder layouts (product cards, checkout, cart), or functional blocks, each with a live preview beforehand.

Pages can be installed together with an optional Theme Settings Preset. A safe-removal function deletes only the imported fragments of a specific demo, so design solutions from different WoodMart layouts can be combined without risking the stability of a running store.

AI agent support via WoodMart MCP

Support for the Model Context Protocol (MCP) has been added. It is an open protocol for AI interaction that lets you connect modern AI agents directly to your WordPress site.

With the built-in WoodMart MCP Abilities module, connected AI assistants receive structured context about the store and can automate development and administration tasks: managing Theme Settings, changing header logos, creating and editing content in Gutenberg, reading and modifying WoodMart Layouts, and applying prebuilt templates.

Animated rotating text

Highlighted text fragments within Title and Text elements can now cycle through an animation. Available styles include a typewriter effect, a clip transition, a slide-up, a drop-in, and others.

Other theme improvements

• WooCommerce Variation Gallery: support for the native WooCommerce feature for individual image galleries per product variation.
• Preview item: choose a specific product, blog post, or portfolio item while editing Single Layout templates in Elementor and Gutenberg.
• Cart price display with dynamic discounts: with Dynamic Discounts enabled, the cart shows the discount received for the combined quantity of all matching products.
• Full-width “Buy Now” button: stretch the one-click purchase button to the full width of its container.
• New “Style 2” pagination for the product card’s hover image gallery.
• Border radius in Header Builder: corner-rounding controls for search, account, cart, wishlist, compare, and the mobile menu.
• Active menu states: separate typography settings for Hover and Active states in navigation and the account menu.
• Open tabs on hover: a new way to switch tabs within the Tabs element.
• New templates: ready-made content for popups and floating blocks.

Speed, SEO, and accessibility

• Local Google Fonts by default: “Load Google Fonts locally” is enabled right after installation, for speed and GDPR compliance.
• Carousel optimization: carousels initialize only after the first page scroll, reducing main-thread blocking (TBT).
• <img> option for background images: Container, Section, Row, and Column blocks in Gutenberg can render their background as an <img> tag instead of CSS background-image, helping LCP and image indexing.
• Native lazy loading: below-the-fold images now correctly receive loading="lazy".
• Accessibility: clear labels for compare, wishlist, price tracker, and quick-action buttons.
• Video posters: Gutenberg blocks now use the native HTML poster attribute, supported by LCP optimization and image preloading.
• Partial removal of the imagesLoaded JS library, which was shifting image loading priority.

Bug fixes and compatibility

A number of minor bugs were fixed in the 8.6 release, along with stability improvements:

• Updated compatibility with WPBakery 9, WordPress 7.1, and the latest WooCommerce templates.
• Fixed free-shipping calculation with currency conversion in WPML and WOOCS.
• Improved mobile header cache interaction with WP Rocket.
• Fixed field validation in the dynamic discounts system and coupon handling.