StackExchange is Testing a Proposed Q&A Site for WooCommerce

StackExchange community members have proposed a new Q&A site for users and developers of WooCommerce. The proposal is currently in the “Definition” phase, which means that participants are working to design the community by proposing hypothetical questions that embody the topic’s scope.

So far for WooCommerce, popular hypothetical questions include:

How do I handle the EU VATMOSS regulations in Woocommerce?

How do I create an Order using WC REST API in my application?

How to hide “add to cart” on free products?

How to implement multiple versions of one digital product with different buyers’ customizations?

In order to move on to the next milestone, the site must have at least 40 questions that have a score of at least ten net votes (up minus down). The WooCommerce staging site needs the following:

5 more followers

33 more questions with a score of 10 or more

People to max out upvoting quality questions already in the proposal (users can only vote 5 times)

The StackExchange for general WordPress Development is thriving with 17 million page views and 14K new questions in 2014. However, questions regarding third party plugins are considered off-topic and will be closed by moderators, hence the need for a separate WooCommerce Q&A site.

Alex Miller, one of the supporters of the WooCommerce StackExchange proposal, believes that the WooCommerce community needs a place where developers can quickly get answers to questions.

“The WooCommerce Community Forums seemed like a decent place but was shut down months ago for unknown reasons,” he said. “My experience with the Woo Community Forums is that it was too broad and the upvote downvote system was poorly handled – good questions got buried too quickly with the large influx of new questions.”

In contrast, the StackExchange model pushes questions that have activity (edits, comments, answers) to the top of the frontpage and lower quality questions (downvoted, flagged) receive less attention.

“Having a WooCommerce StackExchange site is also a great place for people with a great understanding of WooCommerce to document their knowledge for search engines to easily find,” Miller said. You can see an example of this by sorting the WPSE questions by votes and reading the first few questions and answers.

“I can only hope that with Automattic’s acquisition of WooCommerce, the forums will be reopened (WooCommunity forums have been shutdown for a few months now),” Miller said. “But either way I don’t think there is a much better platform than what the StackExchange offers.”

As StackExchange Q&A sites are entirely community driven, WooCommerce community members who are interested in seeing it succeed are encouraged to log into StackExchange and create/upvote quality questions that represent the community’s interests.