State of Woo State of Woo

     The talk is the first installment in a series of talks that will highlight the talks that are being held at WooConf. You can watch the talk on the internet or you can read a few of the highlights here.

It has had a remarkable success over the last five years. There are more than 32 million downloads, a staggering 3 million active users and hundreds of contributors in the Open Source project. This isn't just an application plug-in anymore. We're a platform with a thriving community.

Because we've been fortunate to have achieved success, we now have influence. According to the saying,

The power of great power is also accompanied by the responsibility of a great deal

Our team takes this responsibility very carefully. We've taken seriously a look at the entire platform and are figuring out ways we can make sure it lives up to the expectations of its users.

Over the last year we've spent a lot of effort and time making products that are durable and reliable in the long term to three groups of users such as store owners, builders of stores, as well as extension developers. I'd like to present a few details of our work and the learnings we've gleaned, and some indication of where things are going.

An emphasis on Design and user experience

John Maeda joined Automattic just over an year ago. He is responsible for making sure we offer an excellent the user experience throughout Automattic, and that everything that we create is accessible.

The philosophical aspect of inclusion is crucial for us. In the end, our goal is to make the world of publishing and commerce more accessible to everyone. It is also crucial since our work will only get better in the presence of a wide range of perspectives. They can enable us to become more thorough and comprehensive when figuring for the most effective solution to problems.

Our aim is to make publishing and commerce to everyone.

As part of this our efforts, we're spending longer to get to know the users we serve in the most fundamental and thorough way. We're looking to ensure that we're following the right path so we'll be able to have the maximum positive impact on our users. We're conducting more thorough studies across the globe including tests and interviews with almost anyone we can get to.

The last year was a great one for this research and this helps us to make significant improvements for every stakeholder type in our platform.

An Eye on Store Builders

In the spring of this year, we released 3.0. The most significant improvements to this release are abstractions like the brand new the CRUD (Create from scratch, replace, update, and delete) classes as well as the Version 2 version of the REST API. The abstractions let us separate the is the most important parts of the API itself which is crucial to scaling and giving clients the capability to customize different aspects of what they need in business.

It's an important step in the direction of an advanced, abstracted method of development based on APIs. It allows us to profit from all the great things about WordPress however, it's done in a different way to meet the specific needs of the e-commerce industry. It doesn't serve the larger system to allow everyone to hack at the same time to find what they need for themselves in a constant manner, and this results in interoperability issues and upgrades. We'd wish to see this become more logical so that there's no unexpected conflicts.

Releases

In the beginning, when we first introduced 3.0 it wasn't a smooth launch. Our team members spent a lot of time helping users with problems. Kudos for our Happiness Engineers and the Core development team that did amazing job at meeting the demands of the users.

The lessons we learned through the process have changed our method of creating . We learned that we're in need of a better up-to-date and maintain user experience. We're committed to releasing important improvements on a regular basis. We can't release new features when people are afraid of the thought of upgrading.

It's impossible to roll out new features if people fear upgrading.

This isn't just our job but also a crucial responsibility to our extension builders as well as store builders. We're developing systems which will enable us to all cooperate to achieve this. We're committed to making the upgrade and maintenance experience an absolute success.

We're committed to making our maintenance and upgrade experiences rock solid.

The things we're doing here at Automattic include:

• A regular cadence of releases that is at least every quarter (we are referring to them as "release trains").
• End-to-end and unit tests for the core and all of our extensions.
• Testing and manual upgrading with a large number of sites prior to the official launch.

Things to look forward to in the near future are:

• Faster database tables designed for ecommerce.
• New event queues.
• Improved checkout procedures.
• There's plenty of data-driven research and insight. If the owner of a business isn't aware of the condition of their business it's difficult to make the right decision regarding how to enhance their operations.

Did you know that there is an officially-licensed Develop blog? Follow that blog If you're interested in their road map.

Extension Subscriptions

This gives a significant improvement to the efficiency of our store builders so there are many stores that have large and growing set of customers. We realized that we have the ability to provide them with additional tools to help them manage massive sets of stores as well as clients.

Focus on Store Owners

We have put a lot of effort into how we could make it simpler for owners of stores with little technical background to get started. This is done through a range of cutting-edge cloud services and a simplified UX for users (UX). We're providing the full set of services for free to help stores get operational faster.

In 3.2 we launched an onboarding process that is built on our cloud-based services. Now a new user can get payments and real-time shipping rates as well as precise sales tax within five minutes before even adding the first item!

The service we're developing is built by leveraging Automattic's experience and expertise as well as its cloud technology infrastructure. Instead of creating and maintaining separate platforms, we're uniting all of our efforts to build more robust services and doing so faster.

In addition, we'll make the most of Jetpack as it is an extremely robust platform that can provide cloud-based services. We are currently cooperating together with the Jetpack Jetpack team to add solutions that address the specific needs of online commerce. Expect to see more cloud-based offerings coming out in the next couple of months.

Focus on Extension Developers

For extension developers, their main goal has been to improve the quality of their offerings. We've had a lot of queries over the last year from developers wanting to include additional offerings on the site.

It's also been reported that current extension developers want more interaction with their clients as well as greater control over their product pages and documentation. It is logical to think that developing extensions is a software business and the success of any software firm is usually directly tied to how developers communicate with their customers.

After a lot of exploration and preparation, we're implementing significant changes in order to fulfill these requirements.

• We're giving extension developers higher commissions.
• Developers now have greater control of their pages and documentation, along with other components of the experience their customers can expect when using their products on the marketplace
• Developers can now have greater direct access to their customers through customer service to build personal relationships with their customers and get firsthand information about their needs.

A change we made to the marketplace we launched last year was the decision to renew memberships at full price (rather than at a 50 percent discount). The moment we announced this change, there were some negative reactions. We did our best to limit the negative effects on the customers who reached out to us. once again, I congratulate all of the Happiness Engineers for their empathy and diligence with these conversations.

It's crucial to make clear the reason we changed to ensure the safety of our users and also to ensure the longevity for the community we serve. The extensions on the market are top-quality extensions that will justify paying for on continuous basis. We believe that this pricing model will help set the standard for high-quality software and service to both users and developers of extensions.

We believe this pricing structure will set the appropriate expectations of quality in the software and support for both the users who use it and developers of extensions.

We also want to ensure that we invest any extra profits back into the marketplace by increasing the commissions paid to developers as well as upgrades to support for the primary plugin offered by Automattic. We've also incorporated live chat support, as well as greatly increased our service's response time.

In conclusion, and looking towards the future

The time which has gone in the past was a busy one for the ecosystem. The platform is growing and increasing, while the number of users growing. This is really amazing and heartwarming to those fortunate enough to be in the middle of this all. We're putting all this in tandem, which is a true testament to the power of open source. Automattic We are Automattic We're incredibly thrilled of the accomplishments we've achieved and are looking forward to what the next is in store.

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