WooCommerce recently made an entire overhaul of its highly visible dashboard screen in the WordPress admin available as a new plugin that can be downloaded free from the WordPress Plugin Directory. The new design is gorgeous, of course. I mean, anytime WooCommerce touches an admin screen, other plugin developers really pay attention because it influences they way many of them approach UI in WordPress.
But the real reason the new dashboard struck me is the sheer amount of data WooCommerce provides users. As someone who has worked on a fair share of WooCommerce (and non-WooCommerce) online stores, reporting is something that comes up quite frequently and it’s nice to know WooCommerce not only bakes it right into their product, but designs it so well that it’s easy to glean insights about sales, products and customers at a glance.
If you’ve had to integrate custom reporting into an online store a la Google Analytics or some other tooling, you’ll know that it requires a fair amount of setup and know-how to make sure data is feeding into the right places, certain clicks or actions are getting tracked, and that the reports themselves are solid, including things like filtering by date and other variables. That’s a lot of work considering we can get that and more, directly from the makers of the e-commerce platform.
As Woo mentions in its post, the dashboard changes contained in the feature plugin are merely a preview of what’s to come and we have a lot of other fine features to look forward to, including new types of reports, activity feeds and more. There’s a lot of power and flexibility to be gained if setting up an online store is in your cards, then the fact that WooCommerce and these features are completely open source and free of charge in the WordPress ecosystem practically make it a no-brainer.
