It’s been a while since we had our Community Chat #4, our team has been hard at work with the 3.8.0 release, but here comes the summary of our chat #4 where 21 people attended.
If case you missed this chat, you still can read the full backscroll of the dev chat here.
WooCommerce 3.8
We started the chat with the (then) upcoming version of WooCommerce 3.8 and discussing how many people joined the pre-release testing. Several people indicated that they plan to upgrade WC as soon as other extensions declare their support for the new WC version.
We’ve reiterated that we’re improving our testing practices and since 3.7, we’ve put much more effort into pre-release testing and also perform automated compatibility checks with marketplace extensions. This testing plan continuously evolves and will be refined in the upcoming releases.
There has been a suggestion to start testing common combinations of plugins as well (e.g. WC + WC Subscriptions + WC Memberships, as opposed to separately testing WC + subscriptions and WC + memberships). This is something we might implement in the future.
Order status revamp
Gerhard then took the mic and gave an introduction to the upcoming changes in order statuses. The one order status will become obsolete and will be replaced by statuses for payment, shipping, and fulfillment of each order. This should provide more clarity to merchants, who should be able to tell instantly if an order is paid or not, or if it’s been shipped to the customer.
We currently don’t plan to support the possibility of adding new status groups (besides payment, shipping, and fulfillment).
In phase 1 of the project, we plan to introduce these changes to the WooCommerce core. The following phases would revamp the managing, fulfilling and refunding orders, and later it would make it into WooCommerce admin.
We were happy to hear people are willing to test these order status changes out, so we hope we’ll be able to provide a branch/pre-release version soon to keep the momentum going.
This change has the potential to be one of the biggest store workflow changes WC has ever made. opens so many possibilities
Patrick Garman
Release process update
We’ve introduced our release train process which is currently based on releasing smaller, better-tested releases every 2 months. We still plan to use SemVer as a communication vehicle (mostly) for developers and agencies so that it’s more apparent when breaking changes are about to happen.
By using this, we’re hoping our customers to have clear expectations and smoother upgrade path for regular WooCommerce releases when they come.
Questions time
Community questions revolved around closer integration with Gutenberg and the introduction of product blocks with child/nested blocks inside of them. We were happy to reveal (then) upcoming beta of WooCommerce blocks 2.5, which generated some excitement 🙂
People have also asked for the timeline of the WooCommerce admin merge, which seems to be somewhere in the first half of 2020. Most of them have been rightfully excited about it and are hoping the WP admin navigation experience will improve with WC admin and Gutenberg as well.
the WC admin plugin [is] a huge step forward for WC, and I highly recommend keeping an eye on that space.
Patrick Garman
There has been a question around the installation of WooCommerce core along with sub-packages (REST API, blocks) from Composer via Packagist, to which we don’t have a definitive answer yet, as we haven’t tried it, but we encouraged people to try it out and report bugs/problems in GitHub.
Till Next Chat!
Thanks again to all whom attended. If you have any ideas on how to make our chats more helpful, or if you have a question/topic you would like to discuss, please leave a note in the comments below.
The next chat is scheduled for November 28, 2019, at 08:00 UTC.
Leave a Reply