I ended up in a position where I've become responsible for a very high volume WooCommerce/Wordpress store and the things that I've seen in _brand new code_ is mind boggling. Their new, branded, in-house paypal plugin/integration is currently at 1.5/5 rating on the wordpress plugin marketplace [0]. It just doesn't work for various reasons for various people. It's 2021, how do you screw up a payment gateway for wordpress when you _are_ wordpress? But wait, there's more. They already had PayPal integration, built into the core and already included in all WooCommerce installs. So what to do? Force disable the already existing, working-properly, integration and recommend their new plugin to be used. [1] This is hostile.
If your woocommerce webhook delivery fails 3 times in a row, woocommerce will just turn off that webhook/stop delivering them. Silently. No option for any sort of alert to be sent/logged, no way to store/replay the missed webhooks. Just off. This is irresponsible.
Our installation happens to have a lot of details that go into each line item on an order - which, in turn, turns into many rows of meta data. Woocommerce doesn't rely on dedicated tables for orders or related metadata, it's all stuffed into 'posts' and 'post_meta'. It doesn't scale well, terrible really. It's a large enough problem that LiquidWeb starting working on a fix for high volume sites that end up getting crushed with database/performance issues related to these tables/the way the order data is stored. [2][3] This was supposed to merged into the WooCommerce core but that seems to have stalled/fizzled.
I was able to reduce response time on an API request to get_order() from 3-5s to 0.25s by adding an index to the meta table mentioned above. (The query wasn't using any index) This likely isn't the case for the vast majority of installations, or it doesn't matter because the databases are small enough. But things like this indicate to me that the test suite/benchmarking is seriously flawed - or they're not doing things like testing and benchmarking against real-world databases.
Taking a look at various release notes the types of bugs seem to indicate to me there's not a lot of automated testing going on or that things are so convoluted/messy that it's become too complex.
All in all, for the people behind the PHP workhorse (the hero we deserve...) it's all pretty scary. The code quality, quality control and just about everything leaves a poor taste in my mouth. I'm not a big "Team PHP" guy - I like the idea of using the right tool for the job and the scary thing is that Wordpress is the right tool for the job for a lot of people. (WooCommerce, these days, is basically never the right tool)
This is a terrible look for PHP.
Laravel/Symfony on the other hand... take my money. It's a pleasure. LiveWire, tailwind, oh my.
There's still a place for Wordpress - it's not going anywhere... but it's got a long way to go before I'd say it's anywhere near ok. Let alone approaching latest standards (even despite it's supporting older versions of the language). Can we get first-party/first-option composer support? Why, again, is it another company driving Wordpress forward? [4]
[0] https://wordpress.org/support/plugin/woocommerce-paypal-paym...
[1] https://developer.woocommerce.com/2021/07/12/developer-advis...
[2] https://github.com/liquidweb/woocommerce-custom-orders-table
While I agree this is an antipattern it appeared to be the recommended way when I first got into WP plugin development. IIRC because one cannot guarantee hosting will backup all tables of the DB, and some DBs mix other non-WP stuff.
