Alright, this title may not really help you understand what I mean, so let’s put it in another way. When, as an administrator, you edit an order and are in the Order Items table, you have the chance to edit the item quantity, subtotal and discounted price (see screenshot below).

Now, what if you also want to have the freedom to display and edit another custom field, so that it is saved inside the order once you hit the “Save” button?

This could be useful for custom setups – for example let’s imagine the admin has the necessity to also define the “shipped quantity”, so that they know exactly if a specific order has been entirely fulfilled or requires a second shipment to get completed.

Either way, see the screenshot below, play with the snippet, and see how it goes. Enjoy!

Manual operations are always a nightmare for WooCommerce store owners. Thankfully, a bit of code can help and actions that would normally take hours can be executed in a few seconds via PHP.

Today, we’ll take a look at a very edge case, but this can still be helpful to understand the code and re-adapt it to other scenarios. If as a store owner you tend to replace products or product lines, it’s possible that you may need to replace the old products with the new ones inside existing orders, retroactively.

It’s a one-off operation that could take hours if it had to be done manually, based on the number of existing orders. With this simple snippet, however, you can edit an unlimited number of orders, and let the code replace ordered items. So, let’s see how this is done. Enjoy!

When you edit an order as an admin, you’re presented with the usual WooCommerce layout: order details on the left, order action on the right, the list of order items on the bottom left, and – possibly – additional meta boxes added by third party plugins (e.g. the PDF Invoice and Packing List plugin order meta box where you can define the invoice date and number).

On top of that, it’s also possible, of course, to define our own custom meta boxes, so that the administrator and/or shop managers can view (or even enter) additional information.

I’ve used it on a client website to show a custom field, but you can print anything you wish – even documentation for shop managers (how to complete the order for example).

So, here’s how we add a new “section” (meta box) to the single order edit page in the WordPress dashboard, and how we display some content in it. Enjoy!