Sean D. Conklin

  • Cart and Checkout Blocks are going mainstream

    We have newer WooCommerce Cart and Checkout experiences powered by WordPress Blocks, AKA Gutenberg. These have been available for years via the WooCommerce Blocks beta plugin and were wrapped into WooCommerce core starting in version 6.9 from September 2022. Plugin compatibility has been consistently improving ever since. As-of the recently released WooCommerce 8.0 this is…

  • PHP 8.2 is rolling out now

    All sites should be running PHP 8.0+ by now given PHP 7.4 lifecycle ended late last year. PHP 8.0 will hit EOL later this year and sites should be upgrading at this time. PHP 8.1 was released in December 2021 and was succeeded by PHP 8.2 in December 2022. PHP 8.1 speeds-up WordPress 3.5% according…

  • Why you need to keep your Shopify theme up to date

    Update: I’ve discovered the achilles heel of Shopify. Having worked with Shopify over the past six months, I’ve observed how important the theme is to the storefront. It’s a highly opinionated design and feature layer that contains design settings and custom code. Update from October 16th, 2023 I took a peek at five stores that…

  • Onboarding WordPress VIP Go

    I recently helped migrate a client into WordPress.com VIP Go enterprise hosting. This hosting is for larger sites with hosting budgets starting around $25,000 per year. It’s an opinionated platform that applies perhaps the greatest degree of WordPress management available. Here’s notes I took on the process: For more details on WordPress VIP, see their…

  • Hear me chat with fellow developers Zack Stepek and Carl Alexander on today’s (6/6/2023) Do The Woo Podcast episode! We covered a large gamut of WooCommerce development – from plugins to the full site editor, blocks, performance, staging, AI and more. Click the button to open the episode on the Do The Woo website. There’s…

  • After careful consideration, I’ve decided to join the Shopify Partner Program and start working on proprietary Shopify powered sites as well as continuing to work on open-source WordPress + WooCommerce powered sites. Recent statistics from BuiltWith indicate that Shopify leads greatly over WooCommerce Checkout, particularly in the United States market. Information I hear from colleagues…

  • Local WordPress development via Homebrew

    June 2024 update: These days I recommend the lightening fast SpinupWP control panel connected to a Dedicated CPU Premium Intel server at Digital Ocean. This is faster than any local environment I’ve ever used. Remember to follow good security practices and password protect any dev environment. Here’s a follow-up to my March 2022 article on…

  • Avoid WooCommerce staging environments

    Over the years I’ve faced lots of problems with staging environments. A cure-all for me has been deleting them and using LocalWP for local sandbox environments. Plus it adds so many useful features! I’m inspired to write this post because to this day I hear technical support representatives ask to try something on staging, or…

  • WooCommerce multi-vendor setups

    On a few occasions I’ve heard of multiple shopping cart sub sites, sometimes powered by a WordPress Multisite Network that supports multiple WordPress sites within one via URI path, subdomain, or domain name. Examples of this include: business product lines, departments, or clients of a solution provider. Each sub site has some base requirements to…

  • Database Cleanup 2023

    I’m presenting again on WooCommerce and WordPress database cleanup. This time my presentation is for our WooCommerce and WordPress Meetup group event. I’ve previously covered this topic in my WordCamp Los Angeles 2020 presentation and I posted on it in my blog post Cleaning up your WooCommerce database. This is a popular topic with evolving…

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