I raised the following support ticket on WooCommerce:
“I have been using Gutenberg as a plugin on a couple of sites since last January, but until now not on a WooCommerce site. I just activated Gutenberg on a WooCommerce test site and also activated the WooCommerce Gutenberg Products block plugin.I see how Gutenberg works on posts and pages but I don’t see any ‘Gutenberg’ on Product pages.
I thought it might be that the theme I am using was not yet G’berg compatible but it’s the same in the default TwentySeventeen theme, so I switched back.
What is the situation with Gutenberg and adding products and Product pages?”
Reply – Automattic to me:
“The reason you are unable to see Gutenberg when you add a new product is because this is not currently a functionality it provides.”
Reply – me to Automattic:
“Thank you for explaining that adding new products is not yet a feature of Gutenberg.
- Is adding new products with Gutenberg in the pipeline?
- If so, is there a rough date when this will be implemented so that one will be able to add new products with Gutenberg and edit single product pages with Gutenberg?
- Will it be another plugin or will it be part of WooCommerce itself?
- Is it likely to be added by the time Gutenberg is added to core?”
My thoughts
Gutenberg is slated to be incorporated in WordPress core in version 5. Automattic have just announced that version 5 is due for release on November 19. If more time is needed, there’s a backup proposed release date of January 2019.
So I am baffled why WooCommerce is not fully functional with Gutenberg even at this late stage.
I don’t underestimate the coding skills needed to get WooCommerce to work with Gutenberg (or Gutenberg to work with WooCommerce). But WooCommerce is a big part of WordPress ( 4+ million active installations) – so I am really surprised at what I learned.
Update
I got an answer from someone in a Facebook group who pointed me to the discussion group for WooCommerce developers on Github. In it, Mike Jolley said back in May that:
Since WooCommerce is not optimised for the Gutenberg editor we’ve decided to keep the old editor for now so sites do not break when WordPress 5.0 is released. Products are not content focussed so using Gutenberg with our meta box placed awkwardly at the bottom is not ideal.
And back in February, Cladiu Lodromanean said:
It’s just temporary until we develop nice Gutenberg-compatible screens for Products/Orders/etc. When Gutenberg is merged into WP core and released we will be ready with the Products block in WooCommerce 3.4 but editing products and orders in Gutenberg will come in a future WooCommerce release.
So now I know and I will be following the discussion on Github more closely.
That said, what this illustrates for me is that WooCommerce has a communication problem. They should be giving a roadmap to users and not just to developers.
I just gave feedback saying that.
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