Frustrating to See Where the Plugin Is

I’ve been using WooCommerce for 10+ years now and it’s very frustrating to see where it’s currently at. I’m still giving it 4 stars because it’s incredibly flexible and you can do all kinds of crazy stuff with it, but I would really like to see the UI improved greatly. Right now, it’s a mix mash of different interfaces. Half of the admin UI is React based and the other half is legacy. There’s no continuity. For instance, the latest update made the customers list in the admin React based. You would think they would do the same with the orders table right? Wrong. It’s the legacy table class look.

WooCommerce is owned by the same company who pretty much owns WordPress (it’s not community owned, don’t kid yourself). That company is all about blocks, blocks, and more blocks. Yet, here we are stuck with the classic editor for editing products. Blocks are supposed to be great (they’re okay) and we’re told that we should start using them because they are core and the future. Six years in though and a flagship plugin is still using classic editor. So my clients have multiple interfaces to learn now instead of having one. Again, no continuity.

Continuing with the lack of continuity is the cart and checkout blocks. Again, we edit products with the classic editor but BY DEFAULT the plugin uses blocks for the cart and checkout pages. These blocks are incompatible with certain action hooks and filters that have been around forever. Very frustrating. All the React things in general are a PITA and make things much, much harder to accomplish.

They are also starting to cram more and more stuff into the admin section. The site visibility badge was annoying AF but at least they allow us to remove it now with a setting, although it’s turned on by default. The latest update added a new payments admin menu item which has to be removed with code. It was broke and it’s fixed now, although I suspect it will be displaying an advertisement for WooPayments in the future.

My suggestion is to look at the other big e-commerce plugin (initials are SC) which is being adopted by a lot of folks. It admittedly lacks a bunch of features that Woo has, but the interface is gorgeous and consistent.