There’s a good chance you’ve felt challenged at some point by handling WooCommerce staging. It can be difficult to push a website back to live from staging with all your changes intact.
The crux of the problem lay in two tables: wp_post and wp_postmeta. WooCommerce shares these with WordPress, so you cannot just exclude Woo tables by pushing to live. Even if you manage to exclude these, you’ll still find entries in wp_post and wp_postmeta which you cannot exclude.
So What Has WooCommerce Updated?
WooCommerce’s custom order table update tackles this issue. Here are three avenues the update will improve.
Scalability: Before the update, handling the one database table with thousands of rows posed a problem. Now, shops of all sizes can be easily scaled without the need for an expert.
Simplicity: Instead of combing through a huge database table for WooCommerce entries, you can now go through separated, easy-to-handle entries, and easily develop new plugins or implement designs for products/shops/archives.
Reliability: Restoring WooCommerce backups should be much easier. No longer do you have to lose orders, client information, and inventory numbers. WooCommerce will remain untouched If you need to restore WP.
Compatibility
For existing shops and new shops, this will be an opt-in feature; it won’t be the default after the update. By doing this, WooCommerce developers will give enough time to theme and plugin developers to change the way they work with WooCommerce and adopt the new DB structure, all without breaking the existing shops.
Which Tables Are New and What Is Their Purpose?
– WooCommerce Table Structure
- wp_wc_orders: Most current core fields and important meta keys will be stored in this table.
- wp_wc_order_addresses: Shipping and billing addresses will be stored here.
- wp_wc_order_operational_data: This table will be used to store the fields and flags WooCommerce uses to maintain an internal order state. These fields will be kept separate from the core order table since changes are more frequent there.
- wp_wc_orders_meta: Earlier WooCommerce used wp_postmeta for this. This table will allow extensions to store one-off data associated with orders.
- wp_wc_order_notes, wp_wc_order_notes_meta: Order notes were stored in wp_comments and wp_commentmeta, and will now be handled by these new tables.
Summary
WooCommerce’s custom order table update should come as a welcome change to users who can now easily update what they need to. If you would like to contribute or leave some feedback, you can visit this project board on GitHub where WooCommerce is tracking all changes and progress.
Aleksandar Savkovic
WordPress Developer, Lecturer, the product guy interested in Agile product development. WordCamp and WP/Woo Meetup speaker and Organizer, and Community Manager at Cloudways. Also, a Formula 1 and MotoGP freak.
