At the beginning of this year, WooCommerce announced its plan to produce an MVP of custom order tables by Q3, 2022, a long-awaited improvement that promises significant performance gains for stores. The plugin’s development team is now calling for developers, agencies, and hosting companies to test migration to its first implementation of customer order tables.
The process involves migrating orders from wp_posts and wp_postmeta to four new custom orders tables:
- wp_wc_orders
- wp_wc_order_addresses
- wp_wc_order_operational_data
- wp_wc_orders_meta
It requires a staging environment configured with WP-CLI and a staging database pre-loaded with order data.
WooCommerce developer Vedanshu Jain has created a migration testing guide, which details the custom code developers will need to add in order to enable the custom order tables. Once enabled, developers will have the option to migrate tables using WP-CLI or via Action Scheduler.
Jain is requesting feedback from anyone who runs the migration process with details about how many orders, server memory size, DB version, and whether or not it timed out or responded better to a different batch size.
WooCommerce updating to use custom order tables will be a major change that will impact extension developers in different ways. The development team intends to publish an upgrade guide to support adoption of custom order tables after migrations have been ironed out. Later this year, when the update is anticipated to be rolled out to the core plugin, WooCommerce is aiming to make it strictly opt-in at first to allow shop owners time to make their sites compatible.