The Past, Present, and Future of WooCommerce

I was lucky enough to attend and write about the last WooCommerce Developers Conference (WooConf) in Seattle (2017) and the first one in San Francisco (2014). For 2018, WooCommerce didn’t put together another WooConf. They haven’t made any decisions beyond 2018, but they stated that they are currently focusing on the growing and changing needs of the WooCommerce community rather than investing in a conference.

Nevertheless, on October 18 and 19, 2018, Patrick Rauland and Brian Richards put together a virtual WooCommerce conference (WooSesh), which I also attended with the usual distractions that an online conference entails.

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The Past and Present of WooCommerce

Head of WooCommerce, Todd Wilkens, kicked off day 1 of WooSesh. He explained that Automattic, the company behind WordPress.com and WooCommerce is very committed to WooCommerce and acknowledged the WooCommerce team’s achievements.

Highlights for Merchants

• GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) requirements were implemented and some of the code was even used by WordPress core
• Simplified Inventory Management
• Products Block for Gutenberg, a plugin which by now has already over 200’000 active installations (translated into German de_DE and de_CH by Openstream)

Highlights for Developers

• Webhooks CRUD for better WooCommerce scalability and performance
• Custom Product Tables feature plugin which is supposed to be merged into WooCommerce core sometime in 2019
• Developer Tools to e.g. create dummy data for your WooCommerce store and a beta tester plugin to get early access to new features and improvments

WooCommerce Marketplace

The WooCommerce Marketplace or Extensions Store was re-opened in 2018. Hundreds of developers had signed up and Todd invited all WooCommerce developers to productize any custom client work they might have done in the past which could also be useful for other WooCommerce store owners. He also mentioned that exciting products (plugins) like WooCommerce Multicurrency and Multilingual Press were launched.

The Future of WooCommerce

• New Analytics
• New UX and Architecture for WooCommerce Core
  • Transition to React-based JavaScript for much of the store management front-end, see wc-admin feature plugin for more details
  • Explicit focus on developer tools for extensibility
  • Guardrails and Guidelines

• Better Mobile Experience
  • Native Apps, see woocommerce.com/mobile
  • Mobile Web
• More withGutenberg
  • Dedicated Gutenberg blocks squad
  • More blocks, see latest plugin release
  • More work on Gutenberg framework and wp.data
• Performance and Scaling
  • Partnering with hosts for more in-depth knowledge and targeted improvements

After Todd, Aviva Pinchas, Product Lead for the WooCommerce Marketplace and Kelly Hoffmann, Design Director for WooCommerce went into more detail about the future of WooCommerce. The video of the keynote is unfortunately not public, but WooSesh was sponsored by WooCommerce and therefore free for attendees who got a voucher to watch all videos online. You might have to contact WPSessions if you would like to watch the full presentation.

Although I really liked WooSesh, I have to admit that WooConf as a physical conference was a much more engaging learning experience for me personally. I appreciate that WooCommerce wants to focus on the growing and changing needs of the WooCommerce community rather than investing in a conference and that’s probably also the reason why they sponsored WooSesh. It would still be awesome to have another WooConf sometime in 2019 or 2020, wouldn’t it?