WooCommerce is an open source e-commerce plugin for WordPress created by WooThemes, sourrounded and supported by a thriving community. There are thousands of businesses and individuals using, extending and contributing new features and bug fixes on a daily basis. Over 2.6 million downloads to date. If you’re reading this you probably already know those facts, but it’s still impressive to reflect on those facts and marvel at the fertile ground that WordPress as an open source ecosystem has created.
I just cloned the latest WooCommerce version from Github on my local development environment and played with the new settings screen, e.g. the revised tax setup which are very useful. The current Github version already shows up as version 2.2.0-bleeding in the WordPress plugin manager, although on Github it is still tagged as version 2.1.5. On the website it also shows 2.1.5 as the latest version.
WooCommerce 2.1, code named Peppy Penguin, was released a little over a month ago on February 10, 2014. It was initially planned for January, but one month delay is really nothing when remembering that WordPress 3.8 has been released on December 12, 2013 and WooCommerce 2.1 has a minimum requirement of WordPress 3.8. Compare that to the fact that initially the Magento 2 release was planned for end of 2011. At the Magento Developers Paradise in 2010, then CTO Yoav Kutner announced Magento 2.0. Later that year, Magento announced that we could expect a stable release somewhere in Q4 2011.
Those facts make me wanna conclude that Magento has not been able to fully use the potential that an open source developer community provides. It could also be that Magento is just much more complex than WooCommerce, but at least to some degree WooThemes seems to better understand what open source is all about.
WooCommerce 2.1 Highlights
Mike Jolley has described the release highlights already on November 25, 2013 on Develop WooCommerce, the official blog for everything WooCommerce core development related. Since 2.0 (until end of November 2013) there have been over 1,318 commits which sort of speaks for itself.
The full changelog can be found in the readme, but highlights include:
- Revised admin
- Refactored all code
- New MP6 UI based on WordPress v3.8
- Plugin structure refactoring – easier to navigate structure with class files within
/includes/and admin class files in/includes/admin/. - New reports and functions for getting report data
- Tax Rounding improvements – Particularly for tax inclusive prices.
- Price formatting additions – Display prices incl or excl tax on the frontend, and append a string of your choice.
REST API
Personally, I think the most powerful new feature is the brand new REST API that lets you get orders, customers, reports, and products in JSON and XML format. The REST API offers you a way to open your data to external tools, in a secure way. You can read more about the REST API in previous posts on develop.woothemes.com, and in the REST API documentation.
To make core more lean, the following integrations have been dumped from core and made into plugins. The replacing plugins are free to download and install from WordPress.org:
- ShareThis
- Google Analytics
- ShareDaddy
- Piwik
- AddShoppers (formerly known as ShareYourCart)
You can read the full details of these changes in the post on all the changes in WooCommerce 2.1. If you don’t have time to install WooCommerce 2.1 yourself, here are some visual impressions of how it looks like both in the backend and frontend with the default Twentyfourteen WordPress theme.
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