WooCommerce Connect moves into Alpha 2

For the last couple months, since the first Alpha release, we’ve been diligently working on WooCommerce Connect.

We’re excited to announce that we have more features you can exercise in the latest Alpha release. WooCommerce Connect now supports:

• Real-time rate requests for Canada Post as well as USPS
• Merchant defined custom packaging as well as Flat Rate USPS packaging
• A “Self-Help” style debug dashboard to help you see how all the WooCommerce Connect services you are using are doing at a glance

ICYMI – Connect is a new architecture for integrating services with WooCommerce. We’re taking advantage of a SaaS-style Automattic-hosted server to do the heavy lifting and have created a new Calypso-style interface. More on the project here.

Maybe you tried the first Alpha, or maybe you were waiting to see what came next – either way we’d like to welcome you to testing this latest iteration.

Join us in building the future of WooCommerce

Release Highlights

This second Alpha release of WooCommerce Connect works with recently released WooCommerce 2.6 and with Jetpack to bring hassle free USPS and Canada Post rates to WooCommerce Shipping Zones.

Since this is an alpha version, there’s a lot we plan to add, change and enhance. Please take care – this early pre-release code should not be used on production sites.

At this time, WooCommerce Connect is delivered as a feature plugin, and the grand plan is to roll out Connect into a future WooCommerce core release.

For developers, this is an great opportunity to:

• see the future of WooCommerce development
• see examples of incorporating React into WooCommerce administration
• see how we’re using JSON schemas provided by the WooCommerce Connect servers to drive the layout and composition of the forms for shipping services – making adding features much less likely to require plugin updates
• see examples of how to extend the WP REST API and Shipping Zones in WooCommerce 2.6

Alpha 2 Testing

Alpha 2 is out today. Subsequent alphas will be released if needed and we’ll post on this blog if this happens.

If all goes to plan, Beta will begin during Summer of 2016.

If you’d like to help test, sign-up to be a tester – we’d love to hear from you!