State of Woo -

 This is the very first installment of a series that highlight talks at WooConf. The talk can be viewed online or read some of the highlights below.

has been amazingly successful over the last five years. It has more than 32M downloads, a staggering 3 million active installs as well as over 600 contributors to the open source project. It's not just a plug-in anymore, we're a platform with a thriving community.

Since we have been fortunate to achieve success, we now have influence. As they say,

The power of great power also comes with great responsibility

Our team takes this responsibility very carefully. We've taken seriously a look at the entire platform and figuring out how we can ensure it's living up to its responsibilities.

Over the last year we've invested a significant amount of time and energy creating solid and durable in the long term for three users groups: store owners, builders of stores, as well as extension developers. I'd like to present a few details of the work we've done as well as the lessons we've gleaned, and a hint of where things are going.

An emphasis on Design and User Experience

John Maeda joined Automattic just over an year ago. His job is to make sure that we provide a great design and user experience across Automattic, and that everything that we create is accessible.

The philosophical aspect of inclusion is crucial for us. After all, we aim to make publishing and commerce more accessible to everyone. It is also crucial since our work can only improve when supported by a variety of perspectives- they help us become more comprehensive and thorough when we seek out the best way to solve issues.

Our goal is to open publishing and commerce to everyone.

As part of this our efforts, we're spending more time to understand each of our users in deeper and more fundamental methods. We're looking to ensure that we're doing what's right so that we'll have the greatest positive impact on our users. We're conducting more thorough research all over the world, which includes tests and interviews on just about everyone that we are able to.

This last year through this research and this helps us make major improvements to all stakeholder types within our platform.

An Eye on Store Builders

Earlier this year we launched 3.0. One of the biggest enhancements that this version brings are abstractions like the brand new CRUD (Create, Replace, Update and and Delete) classes, and the Version 2 of the REST API. These abstractions allow us to separate the is the most important parts of the implementation itself, which can be crucial for scalability and giving customers the ability to tailor various aspects of their demands in business.

It's a major step toward a modern, abstracted, method of development based on APIs that lets us benefit from everything that's great about WordPress but doing it differently to meet the specific needs of e-commerce. It doesn't serve the larger ecosystem to have everybody hacking away to get what they need for themselves at every turn and it causes upgrade and interoperability problems. We'd like to make this more systematic so there are less unexpected conflict.

Releases

In the beginning, when we introduced 3.0 it wasn't a smooth launch. The team spent lots of time helping people with problems. Kudos for our Happiness Engineers and the Core development team who performed a fantastic job in responding to the needs of users.

The lessons we learned from the experience and have changed our method of developing . We learned that we're in need of a better update and maintenance experience. We're dedicated to rolling out meaningful improvements regularly. But we can't roll out new features if people fear upgrading.

It's impossible to roll out new features if people are afraid to upgrade.

This isn't just our job, it's also an important responsibility for our extension builders and store builders. We're developing systems which will allow us all to work together to do this. We are committed to making the upgrade and maintenance experience an absolute success.

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

Some of the things we're doing here at Automattic are:

• A regular cadence of releases - at least quarterly (we call them "release trains").
• End-to-end and unit tests for the core as well as all our extensions.
• Manual upgrading and testing on a wide set of live sites before the official release.

Some things to anticipate for the near future include:

• Faster database tables designed for ecommerce.
• New event queues.
• Improvements in checkout processes.
• There is a lot of research on data and insights If an owner of a business doesn't comprehend the state of their store it's difficult to make a decision about how to enhance their operations.

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

Extension Subscriptions

This is a huge boost to the success of our store builders, so there are many stores with large and expanding sets of clients. We realized that we have to give them more tools to help them manage large sets of sites and clients.

Focus on Store Owners

We put a great deal of thought into how we can make it easier for store owners with no technical background to get started. This is done through an array of innovative cloud services and a simplified user experience (UX). We're offering the entire suite of services no cost to help stores get operational faster.

In 3.2 we rolled out an onboarding process that is built on our cloud-based services. Now a new user can have payments and live shipping rates as well as accurate sales tax installed in just five minutes, before even adding their first item!

The flow we're creating is built by leveraging Automattic's extensive experience and the infrastructure for cloud-based services. Rather than building and maintaining separate platforms, we're combining all of our efforts to build more robust services, and doing it with greater speed.

Additionally, we'll be making full use of Jetpack, which has a robust platform for delivering cloud-based services. The team is currently working with Jetpack's Jetpack team to include services that meet the particular needs of ecommerce. Expect to see more cloud offerings rolling out over the next few months.

Concentrate on Extension Developers

As for extension developers the main area of goal has been to improve the market. We've had a lot of requests over this past year from developers who want to add offerings there.

It's also been reported that current extension developers want closer interactions with their customers and more control over their product pages and documentation. This makes complete sense developing extensions is a software business and the growth of any software company is usually directly tied to the extent that developers interact with their users.

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

• We're giving extension developers higher commissions.
• Developers are now in greater control over their product's pages as well as documentation along with other elements of the experience their customers will have when using their products on the market
• Developers are now able to have greater direct access to their customers via customer support in order to develop direct relationships and learn first-hand about their requirements.

A change we made to the marketplace we launched in the past year is the move for renewal of memberships full cost (rather than at a 50% discount). When we made this change and there was a few adverse reactions. We did our best to limit the negative effects on any customer who had contacted us. once again, I congratulate the Happiness Engineers for their empathy and diligence with these conversations.

It's crucial to make clear that we made this change for the sake of our users as well as the sustainability for our community. The extensions available in the market are top-quality extensions and will be worth the cost on an an ongoing basis. We believe this pricing structure is a good way to set the standard for high-quality software and support, to both users and developers of the extensions.

We believe this pricing structure sets the right expectations of quality in the software and support for both the end users as well as developers of extensions.

Also, we want to make certain that we invest any extra revenue back into the marketplace itself through more commissions for developers, as well as enhancements to support for the main plugin that is provided by Automattic. We've also added live chat support as well as greatly increased our response time to support.

In conclusion, and looking ahead

The year that has passed by was an active one for the ecosystem. The platform is growing and growing, while users are growing. This is truly incredible and humble for those lucky enough to be right at the heart of it all. We're building all of this together, and that's a true testament to the power of open source. We at Automattic We're incredibly thrilled with the work we've accomplished and to what the future holds.