Blocks, Boundaries, and Breakthroughs: Product Development in Modern Woo

[00:00:02] Ian Misner: Hey everyone, welcome to another episode of WP Product Talk. Today we're exploring what it's really like to build in WooCommerce in the age of blocks. Our guest today is Kathy Darling. She's from Backcourt Development. might know her as Helga the Viking. She's one of the developers in the Woo ecosystem who are actively working alongside Woo with the cutting edge of blocks. So know, the interactivity API, all that fun stuff. So we're going to dig in a little bit into the fun, the frustration and the practicality of building on modern. Let's get into it.

[00:00:34] Matt Cromwell: This is WP Product Talk, the place where every week we bring you insights, product marketing, business management and growth, customer experience, product development, and more. It's your go-to podcast for WordPress product owners by WordPress product owners. And now, enjoy the show.

[00:00:59] Ian Misner: All right, so I'm Ian Misner I'm with Kestrel. We do a bunch of WooCommerce extensions here. we got Katie, if you want to introduce yourself.

[00:01:09] Katie Keith: Hi, I'm Katie Keith, founder and CEO at Barn2 Plugins.

[00:01:15] Ian Misner: And a couple of quick announcements as we get started. I do want to give a huge thanks to Freemius. They've stepped in as the exclusive growth sponsor for WP Product Talk. Freemius is a merchant of record that handles everything around selling software. So payments, subscriptions, licensing, tax compliance, let you focus your time on building your product.

[00:01:36] Katie Keith: Yeah, and the easiest way for you to help the show is to hit subscribe right now. It only takes a second and it really helps us hit our goal of 10,000 subscribers. So thank you so much.

[00:01:50] Ian Misner: Yeah, absolutely. so today, as I said, we have Kathy here with us to discuss what it's really like building products in the new WooCommerce block era. So she's working a lot and pushing through and getting through the headaches that a lot of us have faced and staying on the cutting edge. So Kathy welcome. For those who might not know you, can you share a little bit about your background and what you've been working on?

[00:02:13] Kathy Darling: Hi, yeah, sure. My name is Kathy Darling. am the founder and CEO of the Women Shop at Backstreet. And I have three plugins in the WooCommerce ecosystem. That's a go. Free gift coupons, mix and match products, and my most famous one, probably Name Your Price. And they are all now like over 10 years old, which I can't really believe. But

[00:02:15] Kathy Darling: you development.

[00:02:40] Kathy Darling: seems to be true, or you could agree to like linear passage of time.

[00:02:44] Kathy Darling: And yeah, I'm just kind of looking at.

[00:02:46] Kathy Darling: how to keep them up to date with Woo and kind of be the first one out there getting things ready for the shifting paradigm, I guess.

[00:03:00] Ian Misner: Yeah, awesome. Thank you for coming on. And for everyone watching live, you know, we do encourage you to leave questions, comments, know, anything you want in the chat there, and we'll highlight comments to discuss with Kathy throughout the show. So Kathy, you have been in the space a while here now. So you've seen Wu move and evolve through, you know, quite a bit of change. actually, so the... The reason we really asked you on here is you show up a lot in the Woo community Slack. So you're experimenting with all the new work they're doing. Both Katie and I, of course, have delved into that a little bit with our teams. And we just really see you pushing ahead with a lot of the interactivity API work, the new add to cart experience and all that. So we're hoping to get you to share a little bit about your experience building with the blog's work, what's worked well and what's been challenging.

[00:03:53] Kathy Darling: I'm I entirely know where to start. you know, I. Bring to help steer me back on, but.

[00:03:54] Kathy Darling: Of course, I don't. If you catch me floundering. I think because my plugins are kind of.

[00:04:04] Kathy Darling: so old and stable, personally just sort of like, I don't know, easily distractible and also kind of interested in like, you know, what is WooCommerce doing? this is funny, like, let me look at it. I guess two of my plugins will be affected by the add to cart switching to interactivity. And I'm just, you know, trying to stay ahead of it one, but also like, I don't know.

[00:04:07] Kathy Darling: I am thing is new and shiny. But I've kind of taken. kind of It's just kind of interesting.

[00:04:31] Kathy Darling: So it's really kind of caught my attention like, yeah, this is the shiny thing. Let me work on it for a while. you know, I appreciate Name Your Price and what it has done for my life.

[00:04:38] Kathy Darling: If much of the There's only so much it needs to still do the thing.

[00:04:45] Kathy Darling: to still do the best it's going to do. It's not a massive, massive scale plug-in. yeah, that's I just, when the cart block and the checkout blocks came out a couple of years ago and they were all front end rendered and they're still quite frustrating to deal with, I thought I would, because I have this opportunity and because something new kind of caught my eye, I feel like I'm getting the opportunity to say like, hey, we're going to

[00:05:10] Kathy Darling: I'm gonna, I-

[00:05:11] Kathy Darling: I'm going to need to do this, which means other people are going to need to do this in terms of extending Add to Cart. And I mean, that's such a core piece of any e-commerce experience anyway. I've given one talk in my whole career because I just don't love planning talks. my work

[00:05:30] Kathy Darling: talk was about like, hey, WooCommerce

[00:05:33] Kathy Darling: customizable. It's like 80 % of the way there. It's the suit off the rack and you tailor to make it your own. And I, for me, the cart and check block deviated from that extensibility principle that I thought, and again, I don't work for WooCommerce, but I thought that was the superpower of WooCommerce. And so I'm pleased that's like the, the Agicart walk pro progress is, you know, taking some of my feedback saying, yeah, like

[00:05:37] Kathy Darling: it just that little bit really out kind of

[00:06:03] Kathy Darling: You're right. so, you know, X is going to need to be extensible and like, how can we do that in a way that's, don't know, not going to drive ourselves crazy with kind of the potential for, you know, breaking everything when everyone starts to everything, you know, you start extending the same thing. Like the three of us are all plugin people. Like we all have three different plugins doing the same thing.

[00:06:18] Kathy Darling: ever doing in working in the same space.

[00:06:27] Kathy Darling: don't know, for me, the hardest part about supporting my plugins is, yeah, like it is going to step on some toes sometimes, or someone else actually is going to step on my toes, and so on and so forth. So we've just kind of go back and forth and talk about, like, oh, I do this extensibility, and how can we do that in a way that I guess we won't have to bang our heads into the walls for the next 10 years over.

[00:06:37] Kathy Darling: been able to

[00:06:49] Ian Misner: Yeah, would you be able to share a little bit about maybe a specific experience where you were able to? The reason I ask is I've seen you've been pretty successful at getting, you know, changes actually made in WooCommerce itself and asking for things and writing the code yourself and having it committed. You know, could you share a story of when and why you

[00:07:09] Kathy Darling: I would say that that's

[00:07:10] Kathy Darling: That will be the key for me getting changes made. It's like, oh, yeah, I need this. here, send it out. I think specifically, like mix and match.

[00:07:18] Kathy Darling: Mixed product is a custom product type. That's one of my plugins and it creates a custom product type. So they were building the Agicart block with all the, I call it blockified, just like all the sub inner blocks. It only supported the core product types, right? Like simple, variable and grouped and even grouped and variable were kind of like coming along after. I said, well, Hey, like I'm going to need product type. So how can I do that in a way that will, you know, match your paradigm? And I, you know, I got rid of the hard coded, like simple variable support and something in here that says like, Hey, if this template is registered here, we're going to render my template. So

[00:07:45] Kathy Darling: to display my said like, all right, we're going put a point of extensibility.

[00:08:04] Kathy Darling: we were able to just kind of go back and forth and say like.

[00:08:06] Kathy Darling: All right, this is kind of how Kathy proposed it.

[00:08:10] Kathy Darling: let's iterate on that a little bit and say, OK, now this is the new. It's not a standard yet, right? Because that block is still in beta. So I guess proposal for, OK, we're going to have these. And my blocks all render on the front end at the moment. The admin side still isn't there. You can't go in and if you've looked at the Aducard beta block, Aducard with options beta, think it's all the full name of it is called. If you look at that block and you pick

[00:08:18] Kathy Darling: the new current.

[00:08:38] Kathy Darling: simple or variable. You can switch between product types. you pick one of the core types, the admin editor changes accordingly. The variable product options block shows up, for example, or the grouped product block shows up. That doesn't work with my product type yet. So the next hurdle, that's 2026 problem at this point for me that's circle back in the new year type of date for me already. So that's still waiting to happen.

[00:08:40] Kathy Darling: which if you. That's a-

[00:09:07] Kathy Darling: And then I guess I'll also, I mean, I'm going to need the exact same thing for name your price. And that's a little bit different because it's not a custom product type. It's basically just meta that says, Hey, like this product supports entering your own price on the front end. It will be actually a little bit trickier, which is kind of why I started with mix and match. was like, mix and match matches kind of what, you know, who already does for core, but, custom product, you know, features or add ons or

[00:09:20] Kathy Darling: So that one I think.

[00:09:33] Kathy Darling: There's a lot of products that add meta and change the way a simple product or a variable product is displayed, right? And we're all going to need a way to make our plugins work together in that space. Like right now, I the old paradigm, for example, together on a simple product. It's going to need that on the other side of this paradigm, too.

[00:09:46] Kathy Darling: price works with product add-ons.

[00:09:56] Katie Keith: Absolutely, yeah. I think that's very wise. Sometimes you just need to do it and then they're more likely to accept your changes because we've had a few experiences at BAM2 where they've refused to do what we needed in order to modify, in this case, the checkout block. I hate that we have to tell our customers who are using a particular plugin not to use the block checkout because it's impossible. And I've talked to you about this privately as well. It is literally impossible to display what we need. And they recently rejected our suggestion. But maybe we need to actually submit that pull request through the work ourselves. Maybe if we've done that legwork, they're more likely to accept it. So I think that's good advice. But my question for you is about timing. As a WooCommerce plugin company, I find it really difficult to know when to invest the development time in making our plugins extensible. For example, there was the beta product editor a while ago, which was then pulled. And so we could have done lots of work to make, say, our variation editing plugin or whatever accessible with that. And I'm glad we didn't because it was then pulled. projects get started and not completed as part of that development cycle.

[00:11:10] Kathy Darling: For sure.

[00:11:16] Katie Keith: What would be your advice about when people should integrate with blocks?

[00:11:22] Kathy Darling: I do not know that I have made thinking all the separate entity interactivity API. So couldn't say do it, you know, I snitched because I'm a little bit bored by my own pleasure.

[00:11:24] Kathy Darling: good decision. doing it to kind of scratch. if it's okay to say that. It's peaking my curiosity more than it's a good

[00:11:41] Kathy Darling: business decision. I also did, I integrated Name Your Price with that product editor that you're referencing and thankfully that only took me three to four hours. That the more complicated version and I'm glad I didn't get into mix and match for the same reasons you're saying. It would have taken me one hour if there hadn't been an error in the documentation that I had to fix.

[00:11:52] Kathy Darling: But I knew mix and match was going to be big And actually the Name Your Price integration. So like that was thankfully a minor. Was also, this is interesting. shiny. Like let me squirrel, you know, let me go do this.

[00:12:07] Kathy Darling: minor investigation that like, interesting like, And that one wasn't thankfully too costly. I haven't actually heard what the status of that is, but I remember liking it and I remember liking the way extensibility was approached there. It's like, okay, I can register some fields in PHP and then they're gonna, you handle the rendering, which was a massive improvement from say like the analytics section of WooCommerce, which yeah, I'll do for an update. One of the first things they turned the... converted to react and that was back when I was like, I'm learning react. but like state where you have to like go in and register all your components and write everything and react and compile it. And you're like, I'm in the WooCommerce community space ranting on my soapbox about how I hate the cause they inevitably

[00:12:59] Kathy Darling: tools all the time, fail on me like half of the time.

[00:13:04] Kathy Darling: So I forgot where we started this.

[00:13:08] Kathy Darling: Is this a good idea? Is this a good business investment? I don't know. Probably not. But I, I,

[00:13:14] Kathy Darling: lucky, very lucky, super lucky to be at a place where I don't always have to lead from a, is this a good business event investment? can kind of go from like, oh, is this piquing my interest? Is this being me involved and interested in commerce? Like that's kind of where I am. Um, like after yeah, 10, 11 years. So.

[00:13:33] Katie Keith: And that's really valuable for the community as well, because you're actively pushing things forward for other people. You've referred to doing the actual code changes and getting that accepted. You also made a reference to documentation a minute ago. So for anybody who doesn't know this process, how do you actually do these things, submit things to Woo so that they are more likely to accept them, documentation or code?

[00:14:00] Kathy Darling: I'm trying to remember if that specific document.

[00:14:02] Kathy Darling: documentation was managed over on GitHub, but I know they moved some of their documentation to GitHub so you can actually send a pull request against their documentation. Just get on my soapbox in the community chat. Like, like. I don't know, I've been around long enough that people are like, alright, she's not just ranting at clouds. She might have a point, so maybe I get a little bit more. I don't know, respect on my name or whatever, you know.

[00:14:12] Kathy Darling: Otherwise, Some of that I think is-

[00:14:32] Kathy Darling: not to be an asshole about it, but there's going to be said for, like,

[00:14:35] Kathy Darling: something this is that I waived my flag and say this is actually a problem I think if I'm having trouble understanding this

[00:14:41] Kathy Darling: 10, 11 years of developing with WooCommerce. Like I've been around before a lot of people at WooCommerce, joined WooCommerce for long time. I'm having trouble understanding this. Like, ah, you're new people, newer people to WooCommerce or newer coders in general aren't going to understand this. So like, let's make that change. you know, the code changes are kind of similar. Like, hey, I'm having this problem. I need to extend this in this way. Here's my use case. Like, I think you're,

[00:14:46] Kathy Darling: I'm like, I'm You yourself are gonna have some

[00:15:09] Kathy Darling: matching use cases. When I talking about extending the add to cart block for the match products, the exact same problem. The cousin to mix and match, is product bundles.

[00:15:13] Kathy Darling: Mixed guess who else is going to have that. you own so like you're gonna you're gonna need this too business the smart business

[00:15:22] Kathy Darling: So the play would be let them do it first, that's not the interesting play. So here we are.

[00:15:31] Kathy Darling: know, just the answer I guess is make a good case, state your argument.

[00:15:37] Kathy Darling: and send the code.

[00:15:40] Ian Misner: Yeah, and I think that there is something to be said for something that you've consistently done is the showing up, you know, the magic of WordPress, the people who show up are the people who get to make the thing right. And that is something that as a member of the who community slack, you're very active. I think it's like you and Lee are basically the two people frequently showing up with like constructive feedback there. The thing that I've struggled with a bit, and this is kind of tied to that ROI question, or when we start building it that luckily, there's people like you in the community who are just plowing ahead anyways. But there is this concept who was introduced in the last like two or three years of like curated extensibility, which is very like deliberate on their part. But at the same time, you're able to sort of push through that and, you know, help them identify where that extensibility belongs. I guess the My question on that, so the struggle I've had is that there is this perception with WooCommerce that it is like unstable or you know that the performance issues are of the platform and not of the individual site. And a lot of what they're doing is likely to try to solve that. And again, I don't know if they've publicly shared why, but it does result in teams like ours struggling with, you mentioned earlier, you know, the compatibility with all of, and how do you avoid stepping on other teams' toes and how do you make sure everything works the way it used to? So when you encounter those issues, what steps are you taking to kind of get from point A to point B to convince Wu this fits within their concepts of curated extensibility?

[00:17:19] Kathy Darling: I will give them a lot of credit and say that I think that idea of curated has evolved and they've become quite a bit more flexible about it in the past couple of years. Cause I mean, you saw this Katie with your plugin, but like when the blocks, the checkout and cart blocks, the curated extensibility, the way I heard it, the way I received it was like, nah, we're just not going to do that. We have, we no extensible. And I was like, damn yo, like I've been for so long.

[00:17:24] Kathy Darling: extensibility has came out. no interest in making these blocks. We've been around doing this.

[00:17:49] Kathy Darling: If

[00:17:49] Kathy Darling: And again, maybe this is just me thinking different. It is me.

[00:17:51] Kathy Darling: thinking differently, right? As a plug, as an extension developer, I have a different point of view than the core. Like I think, you know, maybe because the big commerce is being able to extend it like that, you know, that personally benefits me. customers, need to do something because, and I said this in my talk, this talk is years ago now, but this, this is unique, right? So like they need to do different things in the cart, which are, you

[00:17:56] Kathy Darling: team. me I'm like but coming to my head like every business. even in the checkout,

[00:18:21] Kathy Darling: Again, like the add to cart button, like really pivotal to your, you know, the e-commerce store in general, right? I understood at the time, when commerce was saying, you know, we think we can improve checkout by having it less. And I'm like, yes, that's probably true. And that's important consideration, but also like super uniform, not breaking it. made it super uniform, which means then you can't.

[00:18:29] Kathy Darling: understand WooCommerce and I understand That's a really important. made it. That's how you're

[00:18:49] Kathy Darling: customize it for every store that needs something slightly different. And again, my bias point of view was like, that's the primary difference maker differentiating factor between like a WooCommerce and a Shopify. if you can do whatever your store needs at WooCommerce with the right combination of plugins or the right custom code, whatever. So.

[00:19:12] Kathy Darling: I don't know, remind me where we started and clearly losing.

[00:19:15] Kathy Darling: I'm going in a couple different directions there.

[00:19:21] Ian Misner: It's super helpful and I know my question was pretty broad, but Katie, I think you had a follow up there.

[00:19:25] Katie Keith: Yeah, I was thinking the exact same thing about Shopify. The Shopify checkout is not extensible, and that's very intentional that they've created this amazing checkout that converts, and they are confident with that. But I think the current management are increasingly aware that they need to play on WooCommerce's strengths, which is the flexibility. And so they can't do that because that's not what WooCommerce is famous for. People expect to be able to do what they want in order to customize it right down to the checkout, which we've always been able to customize. So it's good to see steps going in the right direction with that. It's a shame though, as you were saying, that initially the attitude was that it shouldn't be extensible because I think that's caused some of the problems they're having now. It's harder to build an extensibility later than if that was the principle from the beginning, which does cause dilemmas when something is currently impossible.

[00:20:23] Kathy Darling: It was very limited. All my plugins like to add a little link in the cart to edit the thing in the cart. They all kind of do it a little bit different. They all function a little bit differently, but they all have a link there. And there was no way in a way that made sense that

[00:20:23] Kathy Darling: Sure, and it's just been... kind of limit thing. have all three. to add it. But it's like the

[00:20:46] Kathy Darling: super hacky, filtering AP response of the product's short description. like, I mean, guess the customer doesn't care, but like I care because it's not pretty. And it was just kind of, yeah, it just.

[00:20:48] Kathy Darling: of the API. This is not how this is supposed to be. do see some... circling...

[00:21:02] Kathy Darling: back to interactivity, I see some there for a cart checkout going that way with blocks and inner blocks. I think they already have the mini cart blockified with interactivity. And I did some experimental work because again, I was looking for something shiny to work on that didn't actually have a application for me. I built, I started building the bones of like a

[00:21:06] Kathy Darling: potential business.

[00:21:31] Kathy Darling: interactivity API cart, I was like, man, we get back to having block or not blocks, if we go to having blocks and inner blocks, well, then all three of us can start adding interval inner blocks on a cart on a line by line basis, which you cannot do now unless you filter the short description like me, which is a weird choice because I mean, if all three of us need to start doing that, it might not work anymore.

[00:21:56] Kathy Darling: So I don't I don't know that they'll...

[00:21:58] Kathy Darling: that because I had a problem with speed, but also that's not my area of expertise, like making things super fast. But there are people who are good at that, right? So I don't know. Maybe you could do that as a potential and just say add compatibility layer or an extensibility layer on top of the current cart checkout blocks. Maybe there's just a new evolution for those blocks where they have inner blocks. I don't know. I don't know what they're going to do there. Like I I just

[00:22:12] Kathy Darling: just instead of trying to add other.

[00:22:29] Kathy Darling: got trained for like a week or two. Kind of started to work and was like, yeah, I don't have something else, Kathy. And it was like, I've left it, but far in the sense of like, it did actually work using the interactivity API. like, I don't know if they're running with it. I don't know if that's a high priority for them to add extensibility to the cart and check out. that would be a pivot from where they've been like, you

[00:22:29] Kathy Darling: one in my brain. something that kind of sort of need to be doing something. then I just kind of, but it like, it got pretty. a possibility? because I don't know if the high priority for them to.

[00:22:58] Kathy Darling: As they said to you, like we love is the cart and checkout blocks are, but I think they've hindered their own adoption rate because, all of us have to use the cart block or the checkout block and still use my feature, which you need for your business case. So where that one's going, like I said, I'm at the moment I'm working heavily in the ad to cart, you know, single product page type of stuff. I caught my eye one day and.

[00:22:59] Kathy Darling: We're the carton. that you can. that was just something that. I procrastinate.

[00:23:28] Kathy Darling: which is also why I'm in the community Slack working on other people's problems.

[00:23:33] Ian Misner: Yeah, we do appreciate that though. We did a fair amount of work with a couple of potential block solutions for some of the plugins that we acquired the year or two ago. And one of the big obstacles we found is even in the areas where we could build the thing, you we would have to replace the entire block. So it wasn't really extending something. It was just replacing it altogether. And the reason we haven't released a lot of that work is because it's then you must use the Kestrel version of something. rather than the actual WooCommerce thing. And trying to avoid taking over the WooCommerce experience is something we've been very deliberate about. I think the reason I mentioned that is as you talk about curated accessibility and what their goals are around that, sort of like the magic of WordPress with hooks and filters and we can all completely ruin our sites or make them amazing is what they're trying to protect us against. But I think for teams like ours, that is what's actually making these challenges around like ROI, is it worth it? Like a meaningful question. I don't know if I have actually a question to land on with that, but I think that's really just where I've been with these problems.

[00:24:45] Kathy Darling: I mean, just to sort of reiterate what I was saying, like if you're looking at it from a return on investment, I would say it's too early. I mean, in of me working on it from a personal curiosity stake, sometimes it feels too early. Because like, I still run into walls and say, you just cannot do the thing, you know, because it hasn't been considered yet. Part of that is the curiosity. it like, you know, I can kind of go through that and say, you know, paying the people who are in charge of the interactivity.

[00:24:53] Kathy Darling: Just in terms the guys

[00:25:14] Kathy Darling: experience and say like, I this, like, what's a good solution here? And then, I'm going to write it now. I'll send you the PR in a day. But from a return on investment standpoint, no, I don't think so. Not yet. It's too early. It would have to be a little bit further along.

[00:25:31] Kathy Darling: for to finish first basically and then you're probably

[00:25:33] Kathy Darling: Probably better to start.

[00:25:35] Ian Misner: Well, and I will say, I'm literally, when our devs are encountering issues, I ask them to check with Kathy to be honest. gosh. Anyways.

[00:25:44] Kathy Darling: And you have my invoice, you can pay me in-

[00:25:46] Kathy Darling: pizza so

[00:25:47] Ian Misner: We'll do, we'll do. So I'm gonna grab a couple of comments here. got Marcus here yelling, I have a solution. It's a lot more effective than I have found a problem, which Kathy, I think you're doing a very good job of demonstrating that that works.

[00:26:03] Kathy Darling: yeah, that's.

[00:26:04] Kathy Darling: That's what I try for.

[00:26:06] Kathy Darling: I know that that definitely is responsible for getting some of my stuff merged into WooCommerce sooner rather than later because it's not to work. I see the folks reviewing it. They work involved in testing my solution, but at least that removes the need to create the solution themselves. That definitely works.

[00:26:29] Ian Misner: Yeah, absolutely. And Nick here is asking when we should expect the next PR.

[00:26:35] Kathy Darling: My name is a little bit delayed because I died is as a USA athlete for our team the national team handball team and We're in training camp next week. So I'm not planning on doing PRS for the next like two weeks

[00:26:36] Kathy Darling: My next PR probably is my other gig.

[00:26:54] Ian Misner: Awesome, awesome. So I will say, I mean, we have talked a lot about the pains and all that and all the how you overcome it. But I mean, what like, obviously, there's something still driving you forward to keep doing it, right? Like you've, you know, the excitement, the fun, whatever it is, you know, what should other product builders, you know, take away from your experience? like, where's the joy? What should we get excited about? It's too early. When is it no longer too early? You know?

[00:27:24] Kathy Darling: I think there's value in doing stuff just because

[00:27:26] Kathy Darling: you enjoy it, you know, so like I said, that's not a super great business proposal, but also it keeps me kind of interested, like let me work on stuff I like working on. Sometimes that is not my stuff. Sometimes that's core WooCommerce stuff. Sometimes it's a random person stuff in the Slack community. And I'm like, that's an interesting question. How would I solve that? Especially if that keeps me from working on some of the more stuff in my own plugins. I was a last week or whenever I was working on it last and I was like, the teacher's built, but now I got to go and

[00:27:48] Kathy Darling: tedious. just working on a few.

[00:27:56] Kathy Darling: update the REST API support and the store API support and the import export support. I was like, that's... So, I don't know, keeps your interest and slogging through some of the other stuff sometimes is necessary, but always finding something kind of new to keep working on.

[00:28:03] Kathy Darling: tedious stuff I don't want to do. finding stuff that...

[00:28:18] Katie Keith: So you talk about it being maybe too early to be cost effective to integrate with some of the blocks. I feel like maybe that applies to some blocks more than others. The checkout one, it's not depending on what you want to do to it, probably not time. Whereas the ones with the display products on certain pages feel a bit more advanced. A few years ago, we were, I hate that having to document. This doesn't work because it's impossible and we are waiting for Wipom to do X. But now we've actually managed to integrate with a lot more than we could say two years ago. So it feels like they're more advanced. Do you have any kind of hierarchy in your head of which ones it is time to integrate with and complete and which ones maybe wait a bit longer or push to change?

[00:29:08] Kathy Darling: don't know if I have a great answer to that.

[00:29:11] Kathy Darling: Like I said, plugins, my plugins are very specific to the product page, right? So I have, that's why I'm, I guess, leading the charge on making sure the, the Agicart block and as that gets, you know, as that progresses and it's progressed quite a lot in the past year. So that's why I have my focus there. Cause like I can, at least the folks I've been interacting with really motivated to get that kind of.

[00:29:36] Kathy Darling: theme.

[00:29:40] Kathy Darling: I won't say shipped, like stable place. It probably will stay in beta for awhile.

[00:29:41] Kathy Darling: Two more. get it stable although I'll really know it's stable when I start hearing they are

[00:29:49] Kathy Darling: on extending it themselves. When I hear product tools and add-ons are doing the work, then I'll be like,

[00:29:53] Kathy Darling: Bundle product. They are serious about this, but they've invested quite a bit.

[00:30:01] Kathy Darling: bit of time. doesn't mean they might not scrap it, but they've, Woo itself has invested a lot of people hours in getting the ad to CartBlock, you know, progressing to support all the product types that they have and starting to support some of, you know, my product types. So

[00:30:14] Kathy Darling: Now

[00:30:21] Kathy Darling: Agicart block, guess, is where I, like that's where I'm putting my energy because it infects me personally. I'm not super aware of some of the other blocks. So I just not informed enough to say about the others.

[00:30:35] Ian Misner: Yeah, I appreciate that. I just, I'm just gonna throw it a little bit again of my experience with Kestrel. And I'd love to get your input on this, Kathy, especially since you spend a lot more time on the block work than what I think my team probably has recently. When we acquired a lot of like the legacy WooCommerce marketplace products, one of the goals, one of the intentions around that was to take these things that have been around a while, modify them and make them work in the new world of blocks, right? So you know, help bring Wu over the, you know, the messy middle of the whole thing. We've actually encountered a lot of issues with that. mean, we've done a lot of releasing things, but there's sort of like two things that we've ended up doing that are feel a bit like cheating because of the difficulties. Number one is a lot of the times we're just encouraging people to put short codes in a block rather than actually building a block, which I... I do think that's probably what most people are actually doing in most surfaces. But then number two, even when we go through the effort of building the actual implementation in the world of blocks, and as a specific example in CheckoutWC, we have the word to bumps feature. The whole interface is in the block editor. And we're actively getting feature requests from people to just put it in, you know, like PHP admin screens. like customers are asking for it. So this kind of gets me to the question of like from your customers with mix and match and name your price, you know, like are you hearing from your users that you need more block support or is this something that is like purely driven by moving with the platform and the excitement of learning?

[00:32:20] Kathy Darling: I definitely haven't had that specific. I have, will.

[00:32:22] Kathy Darling: requests like, say, name your price doesn't offer a ton of customization. It puts a text input above the add to cart button. It's not doing a ton of things. I do want to add a little bit more. People are using it for donations. I want to make that work a little bit better than it currently is. Now it has more to it on the visual user interface side.

[00:32:40] Kathy Darling: does fix and match

[00:32:47] Kathy Darling: and what the front end is and needing to therefore customize that a little bit. There's a lot you can do with PHP snippets because I believed in that. when I read the filters and hooks everywhere, then anytime someone asks me what I'm what is

[00:32:56] Kathy Darling: for something else like, yeah, can throw hook in there. Why not? There's a need to control how that looks.

[00:33:04] Kathy Darling: visually and I have some customizer settings. I think most

[00:33:09] Kathy Darling: Now I you can still access those, but I think in some themes maybe.

[00:33:15] Kathy Darling: Maybe you cannot. I haven't found which ones it is, but I've gotten that report once that like, I couldn't customize it because the settings are nowhere. I'm like, ooh, I wish you would tell me more about this, friend, because I would probably try to fix it for you. thinking like, OK, at a minimum, I need to port those optimizer visual settings into the block editing paradigm. Like, do we want to

[00:33:31] Kathy Darling: That's kind of what I'm- this

[00:33:41] Kathy Darling: As a grid or a table, like that's literally the first one. And then how many do you want? Do you want to show a thumbnail? Do you want to show? I think I have plus minus button support, but like WooCommerce kind of has that in their quantity input. you know, just, just. So that people can then customize the front end display of a WooCommerce, of a mix and match product and all of its, you know, child product options as from a visual standpoint, not needing to add snippets, even though I.

[00:33:56] Kathy Darling: carry some of that over.

[00:34:11] Kathy Darling: impartial to snippets, but like I want to have the visual options. Okay. what curated extensibility, which features, which visual parts do you need to control? Like, cause you can make your user interface even in the admin side, like you can make it wild and control every damn thing. I think blocks will give you a little bit more, you know, if I can make it so that you can control what the single child product looks like, like if you're selling a six pack of sodas, I can make it. What I'm

[00:34:15] Kathy Darling: And I'm like, and I guess I go back to. Think.

[00:34:41] Kathy Darling: shooting for is my target goal with the blocks is like, okay, if you've a the product title and then the product thumbnail, and then the product quantity stepper, you could do that. Or if you want to invert that for some reason and display the quantity and then the product type, like you'll you can do that right now with hooks and filters. But I think with the blocks, you'll be able to do that in the editor, which is, I think that's the goal, my goal for that, that project.

[00:34:44] Kathy Darling: some of them want to display. Yeah, that's another. When we get there.

[00:35:12] Katie Keith: It raises a dilemma talking about customer requests of another factor which is leading us to use short codes when we probably shouldn't, which is when we get customer requests, they are just as likely to be about Elementor or Divi or something else and not the block editor. And so when we're talking about building up actual functionality in blocks, say the ability to create an entire mix of match products and select the products and the layout within the block, that is actually going to be a lot more work if you're going to want to do that in Elementor and all the other major page builders as well. So it's so much easier to do something centrally, say in your plugin settings, and then insert it maybe using a much simpler block or a shortcode or something. So I find that tension between the distribution of different page builders in the market and how quite a lot of them have very high market share. as adding to that dilemma. If we put resources into blocks, we are losing another element of our market and we can't do everything to the standard we would want.

[00:36:18] Kathy Darling: Great, you've given me something new to worry about.

[00:36:24] Kathy Darling: I know they exist, right? I just don't pay attention to them too much except when people come in and say, does it look bad or are you in a page?

[00:36:29] Kathy Darling: Like, you're mixing match product looks bad! builder and it's weird and you've got weird you've applied yourself or you know there's a couple there's one page builder that I won't name right now but like there's one page builder that I had to come and you're breaking mix and match every time somebody uses it could you please display the add to cart never heard back from them so I just you know put one line of CSS in my own plug-in to just not have to deal with that support ticket ever again and you know that's actually a driving factor obviously support you know dictates A lot of what we do and sometimes. Well, for me it's just to reduce my own support load. I'm like, OK, I don't have to keep doing that. But.

[00:37:05] Kathy Darling: Sometimes it I mean that's a good point and I guess there's...

[00:37:15] Kathy Darling: nothing really wrong with maybe us driving it through blocks and then having it, having some sort of PHP wrapper that people can use in other places. the short, could the short code grab a block template and render it out wherever you wanted? Like, I think there's ways to kind of do both without having to think too many resources into the page builders because I certainly don't have the capacity. Like, you I am the primary coder at my company, you know, and

[00:37:43] Kathy Darling: happen.

[00:37:44] Kathy Darling: only so many, that's part of why I never even got to a fourth and fifth plugin. Like I always wanted to make another and it just, I just ran out of Kathy power, you like I need another Kathy and we just, I don't have one. So.

[00:37:57] Ian Misner: Yeah, absolutely. the page builder experience we have very similar with some of our products. when we're dealing with other plugging companies in the Woo space, you tend to just communicate and figure out how to avoid compatibility issues. We typically, with page builders, we just fix it ourselves as a default assumption, which isn't necessarily better, but it tends to be a lot easier, I would say.

[00:38:23] Kathy Darling: That's fair. would say, all of us in the WooCommerce space, if you make the effort to do things, I guess, the most WooCommerce-ish way you can manage, you reduce your own support loads because you reduce the points of friction where things just break. Things do sometimes just break. I think you have to accept that that's a possibility. When you start adding, 50 is inherently wrong, but as soon as you get to that maybe

[00:38:25] Kathy Darling: amongst us. 50 plugins, not the Just don't quite.

[00:38:52] Kathy Darling: talk to each other correctly. I think I had a sort of image optimizing plugin with breaking the mix and match add to cart this week. like, man, I never would have. I I just cannot test everything. It's not possible. We cannot cover everything. they... So the...

[00:39:00] Kathy Darling: gonna type this It's simultaneously like the greatest asset. can do anything.

[00:39:11] Kathy Darling: You can just stack the plugins on and also like the biggest Achilles heel because like, okay, as you start hacking them on, especially if you're not paying close attention, they can start interfering with each other. it's just kind of part of the process that you just sort of have to accept a little bit because it gives you what it gives you, you the ability to use lots of things.

[00:39:20] Kathy Darling: like I don't know I think it's Because because

[00:39:32] Ian Misner: Yeah, I actually made a few people kind of mad at me on Twitter over the weekend with when you install 80 plugins, you know, if they're coming from 80 different developers, you're letting 80 people write code on your site. The odds that one of them have done something wrong goes up. You know, should be vetting the dev team just as much as you are vetting the product itself. Right. So we got a couple of comments here. It looks like Marcus hoping short codes. never go away in one of the single best parts of building in WordPress. I would add to that that the hooks and filters that we're kind of replacing in a lot of ways are just as magical. And then with that, a lot of his Elementor pages, products, it's just a bunch of short coats basically, right? So anything for you two to add on that?

[00:40:23] Kathy Darling: Not really. mean, I don't make or maintain too many websites, so I haven't used too many page builders in general. I think we've had to help some folks with, I think, different page builders when they're trying to use our products in them or their work. Elementor in specific has two add to cart widgets and one is just like the button and people will put the add to cart button in and then wonder why my plugins don't work. You don't have any of the core are required.

[00:40:39] Kathy Darling: time I hooks that for me to play my options so you just have a

[00:40:52] Kathy Darling: display button, try this other one. So that's extent of my working with really any page builder in the last like five years. So

[00:41:04] Ian Misner: Yeah, absolutely. mean, especially if you're being so all in on blocks, would make sense that you'd be really focused on sort of the default experience there as well. So Kathy, we do try to wrap up every one of these shows with a roundtable question. So, you know, if someone's thinking about diving into making a new product for Wublox or updating an existing product to work better, would you have any specific advice, you know, one piece of advice for somebody looking to get started on that path?

[00:41:34] Kathy Darling: I mean, this is probably advice to myself, but like, you know, it's twofold, I guess. And I said one of it, second part, but the first part is, always solve a problem. And then I think the second part is, you know, find something you're going to like working on because you might be working on it for a very long time.

[00:41:54] Ian Misner: Katie, how are you?

[00:41:56] Katie Keith: Mine would be to approach working with blocks flexibly. start by seeing what's possible. Hopefully what you want is possible. If not, then be proactive and positive. Communicate with the Woo team. Consider whether to submit the change yourself in order to make it happen. If that is not approved for whatever reason, then think creatively about what you can do. I'd say the worst case scenario is telling people not to use core WooCommerce features. And I try not to do that where possible. But if something just simply isn't possible yet, then document that in a positive but clear way to your users. And keep checking back, because it probably will become possible in the future. And then you can add that integration.

[00:42:45] Kathy Darling: Yeah, for sure. mean, we've all seen the evolution of WooCommerce, right? And it's only going to keep evolving, especially as we keep finding new use cases to say like, this needs, you need to do this. are we with you? So for sure, it'll just keep evolving as, you know, all of us keep pushing on it.

[00:42:55] Kathy Darling: love you if you could do this.

[00:43:02] Ian Misner: Yeah, and for myself, actually, think, quick story on this is actually, we acquired Express Shoppage from Barn2, among other things. And Express Shoppage is an example of a plugin that, in the old PHP way of things, you needed snippets, needed to write code, you needed a plugin to make things happen. In a perfect world, you actually just wouldn't need a plugin at all for that in blocks. All it does is moves, you know, the variation. editor, the variation drop down in the quantity field to the to the catalog pages. So you know, realistically, blocks should make that happen. So to tie that into a piece of advice is for somebody who's getting started or looking to build a new product, I would actually encourage you to not think about what things used to be like at all. You know, just look at what blocks are how blocks work. And you know, in the new paradigm, in the new way we was building in the direction they're going, what would that look like? For that instead? So solving that problem by ignoring all the old ways altogether instead. All right. So I guess really quick on that, I will drop in Nick's comment as well, actually, because I think that ties to what I was saying quite well. Just blocks done right. Should open that up with more no code experience. It should make it easier for more people to use Woo and to build on Woo. All right, so I guess that's a wrap. Kathy, thank you so much for joining us. Where can everyone watching find you? should they find you? Where should they follow you?

[00:44:36] Kathy Darling: I'm not on Twitter anymore. So the commerce Slack community, you said, I'm Helga the Viking there and I don't know, kind of always.

[00:44:38] Kathy Darling: No, I'm not around.

[00:44:49] Ian Misner: Absolutely. I'll double down on I'm looking for you. I'm using the woocommunity slack. So if anyone's looking

[00:44:55] Kathy Darling: I think I got peer pressured into creating an Instagram.

[00:44:58] Kathy Darling: and I'm what I wouldn't probably give it out here, but I don't use it anyway. So what's the point? But yeah, that's that's probably the place.

[00:45:04] Ian Misner: And your products are primarily on the WU

[00:45:07] Kathy Darling: of the-

[00:45:08] Kathy Darling: Three of them are, yes, all at WooCommerce.com. mean, my website is, I think, backcourt.io, but I...

[00:45:14] Kathy Darling: I don't do that as much as I should, so I don't know. I'm terrible at marketing coding. I'm just a girl who likes coding.

[00:45:19] Kathy Darling: I just like things. Think things what can I say?

[00:45:23] Ian Misner: If you build it, they will come, right? Yeah, so for everyone watching, if you're enjoying the shows, please do us a favor and stop what you're doing right now. Hit the subscribe button and it tells YouTube that other people who are looking to build WordPress products should find the show. Special thanks again to Freemius for helping us grow our audience here as well.

[00:45:25] Kathy Darling: It works.

[00:45:43] Katie Keith: Yeah. And next week, Matt and Ian will be talking to Nick Hamsey about making WordPress weird and building for fun in WordPress. That actually connects with some of the things that Kathy was saying, doing things because you enjoy doing them. And that's good.

[00:45:59] Ian Misner: Yeah, not even on purpose. Looking forward to it. All right. Thanks, everyone.

[00:46:04] Katie Keith: Bye.

[00:46:08] Ian Misner: you