The past few months, we have been hard at work improving the quality and user experience of the WooCommerce core Developer Documentation.
Updated information architecture
Our goal is to make it easier for developers to find the information they need as fast as possible. The WooCommerce developer docs were previously based on a single hierarchy of nested pages, resulting in a lot of top-level folders and less-than-intuitive navigation. As we’ve worked to bring this new structure into WooCommerce monorepo, here’s what might look different:
Improved Navigation. The documentation starts with four new top level items that break up all of the content into more relevant categories:
- Docs – Everything you need to know about building on WooCommerce
- Extensions – Highlighting best practices and workflows for your WooCommerce extension.
- API – The source of information for the WC REST API and our Store API docs
- CLI – Exploring the usage and potential of the command line interface for WooCommerce.
Inside the primary “Docs” category, you’ll find sections dedicated to Getting Started, Features, Block Development, Contribution, and more. The “Extensions” section is focused on building your extension with the best practices and quality levels of the WooCommerce marketplace, like our recently released Accessibility Best Practices.
Better Search Results. We’ve updated our search with a more robust algorithm and deeper indexing capabilities with results that can take you directly to the most relevant section inside of a document. A keyboard shortcut (cmd+K) directly opens this new search field and displays your recent search history.
Ready for AI. Based on the llms-txt specification, our documentation now autogenerates resources into clean markdown files for use in AI-powered IDEs like Cursor and VS Code. Additionally, a new “Copy to Markdown” button is visible on every page so you can paste the relevant doc directly into your chat interface.
Fresh new content
The community relies on the Developer Docs to be the source of truth and best practices for building on Woo, so we’ve begun the process of highlighting key gaps and focusing on high-impact opportunities for new content. We have more ideas in the pipeline, but here’s just a few of the recent updates we’ve published:
New Getting Started Guide. For developers who are brand new to WooCommerce (and possibly WordPress) theming and extensibility, we’ve outlined our recommended approach to local development, filled out our list of developer tools, and highlighted our best resources for properly setting up, populating, and testing a local development environment.
Overhauled Cart and Checkout Blocks documentation. Based on developer feedback, we’ve re-organized our block development documentation and removed the deprecated Product Editor docs. We’ve also added a handful of new clear guides focused on extensibility in cart and checkout blocks.
Cleaner WC CLI commands. Our updated WooCommerce CLI section includes an organized command list featuring a new sidebar navigation showing all of the available commands.
Refreshed Store API Docs. The full Store API documentation has been moved into our developer documentation and updated with the latest information, endpoints, and resources.
Ready for contribution
Our guiding principle in this process was that contribution to our docs needed to be easier, trigger fewer merge conflicts, and facilitate more standardization of markdown content quality. Now we’re seeing documentation PRs generated, reviewed, and merged in a fraction of the time. Here’s a few improvements to the process:
Local development previews. Spinning up a local copy of the Developer docs is only one command away, making it much easier to preview your changes in your local environment and know exactly how they’ll look once deployed.
Linting and build testing. Any pull request touching the documentation automatically goes through testing, including markdown linting and broken link checking, and we’re beta testing an additional AI-powered review from Code Rabbit that offers more intelligent suggestions on PRs.
We are excited about the potential that these enhancements will bring and are looking forward to more changes and more content in the future.
What would you like to see in the WooCommerce Developer Docs? Let us know in the comments or open a pull request on Github.
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