WordPress Dashboard Archives - Business Bloomer

WooCommerce: Add Custom Tab @ Admin Settings

WooCommerce offers a comprehensive set of settings organized into several tabs within the WordPress admin dashboard: General, Products, Shipping, Taxes, Payments, Accounts & Privacy, Emails, Integration, Advanced.

These are the core WooCommerce settings tabs. Depending on your specific setup and any additional plugins you might be using, you might see additional custom tabs as well.

Which is exactly what we’re doing today – creating a custom tab!

By adding a dedicated section within the WooCommerce settings, you can organize your custom settings and keep everything neatly categorized and consistent. This not only improves your own workflow but also makes it easier for any future collaborators to manage your custom options.

This tutorial will guide you step-by-step through the process of creating a custom tab in your WooCommerce settings. We’ll cover everything from setting up the basic structure to implementing functionalities like saving your custom options.

Enjoy!

WooCommerce: Filter By Featured @ Products Admin

Unfortunately, if you still use the “star icon” to feature your WooCommerce products in the admin dashboard, there is no way to “sort by featured” or “filter by featured” in the Products table. If you’ve featured many products, it’s basically impossible to see them all at once, unless you scroll through many pages of products.

Today, we will study how to add a new filter beside the existing ones (“Select a category“, “Filter by product type“, “Filter by stock status“) so that you are able to see all your WooCommerce featured products or – in alternative – all products that are not featured.

In the snippet below, we first add a new select dropdown with the two options, and then we modify the query so that it can listen to the custom GET parameter, and return all featured products or all non-featured products. Enjoy!

WooCommerce: Hide “Private” Products From The Shop Page

WooCommerce admins and store managers can set the product visibility to “Private“. This is helpful if they need to hide certain products from the public, while keeping them available for manual invoicing or other purposes.

The problem, however, is that if admins or store managers are logged in, private WooCommerce products (as well as private WordPress posts, private WordPress pages, etc.) are actually visible on the Shop, Category and product loop pages.

The “Private: ” prefix is added to the product title (see screenshot), but there is usually no need to alter the frontend with products that are not going to be added to the cart anyway!

So, let’s hide private products for WooCommerce administrators from the frontend. Enjoy!

WooCommerce: Search Products By Custom Field (Backend)

In WooCommerce, there are two kinds of search: the customer one (frontend) and the admin one (backend). We’ve already covered how to let customers search into custom field values on top of the default product title and description, so this time we’ll talk about the backend search.

Let’s say, as a WooCommerce store admin, that you’ve added a product custom field (e.g. “gtin“), and you want to make sure the backend search also returns products where “gtin” is equal to the search term. The snippet below will help you do that. Enjoy!

WooCommerce: Allow Order Editing For Custom Order Status

WooCommerce admins are allowed to “edit” an order only when this is in the “on hold” or “pending payment” status. By “edit” I mean having the chance of modifying or adding products, fees, shipping and recalculating the totals, which are not allowed once the order has been placed (“processing“, “completed“, etc.).

However, there are many reasons why you’d want to have the right to edit a processing, completed, or custom status order – of course as long as you don’t end up changing the total, as customers already paid at that stage.

Think about the following scenarios:

you customized the items table and added a custom field, and you want to set the custom field value when the order is “processing“
you need to edit the shipping method name AFTER checkout, and you want to be able to rename it when the order is “completed“
you need to add a fee and a discount of equal amounts (so that the total stays the same) before completing the order

Either way, let’s enable the little “pencil icon” on a custom order status, so that the admin can customize the order whenever they wish!

WooCommerce: Update Self-Hosted Plugin @ WP Dashboard

In this million-dollar tutorial you will learn how to update a custom (WooCommerce) plugin that you host somewhere, directly from the WordPress dashboard.

I thought the WordPress dashboard could only notify you of plugin updates and let you exclusively update plugins that are on the WordPress repository, but I was wrong!

Since I started selling WooCommerce plugins here on Business Bloomer, I had to find a way to let customers update them automatically right from their WP admin.

Thankfully, there are 2 hooks that come to the rescue: ~~pre_set_site_transient_update_plugins~~ update_plugins_{$hostname} and plugins_api. With these two filters, you can tell WordPress that your custom plugin ZIP file is downloadable at a given public URL, show a notification to the customer that a plugin update is available, let them update with 1 click, and optionally let them enable auto-updates.

So, let’s see how I run my plugin business. Enjoy!

WooCommerce: Email Admin Upon Fatal Error

WooCommerce has a nice feature when it comes to WordPress Error 500 / Fatal Error – it logs the error and all the information regarding it inside the WooCommerce Status > Logs > Fatal Errors area.

My problem is that sometimes these errors occur in the backend, so they may not trigger the WordPress built-in email that notifies the admin about the problem.

What I want to try (please test it on your development website first, and not on your live website), is a way to get an email each time WooCommerce logs an error, so that I can go in and fix it immediately. Enjoy!

WooCommerce: Disable Orders Table Row Hyperlink @ Admin

If you access the WordPress dashboard and go to WooCommerce > Orders, you will be presented with the WooCommerce “Orders Table” i.e. the list of customer orders. Each row comes with several columns, such as the order number, order date, order status, order billing and shipping addresses and more.

What’s annoying sometimes is that the whole row is a clickable link, so if you need to copy and paste some information you will end up actually clicking on it, and being redirected to the single order page.

There is a way to add a specific “class” to each table row, so that it becomes not clickable, and the only link that remains is the very first column table cell – the order number (as it should be by default!).

So, let’s see how easy it is to alter this default behaviour. Enjoy!

WooCommerce: Bulk Re-Send All Customer’s Completed Order Emails

This is quite an uncommon WooCommerce requirement, but especially for downloadable products the Completed Order email is such as important one – and customers may end up asking you to resend them all their past order emails.

This is an interesting snippet, as it features important functionalities: getting orders by billing email, looping through the results and re-triggering the Completed Order email whenever a specific admin URL parameter is posted. Enjoy!

WooCommerce: Count External Product Clicks

Yeah Google Analytics is cool, but have you ever coded your own tracking functions within your WooCommerce website?

An example may be counting the number of times customers click on the “Buy product” button that displays on the Single External Product Page, and show the counter in the Products Table in the backend.

For example, I use this to calculate the Click Through Rate (% clicks / views) and see how popular an external product is. Of course, you could also decide to extend the counter to all products (simple, variable, etc.) and count the number of times customers click on the Add to Cart, but for today let’s stick to the external products count. Enjoy!

WooCommerce: Bulk Search & Replace SKUs

Yes, you could use a plugin to bulk search and replace a given string inside the WordPress database… but today I want to show you a simple snippet you can use to bulk edit SKUs in your store (please test first on staging or a development site!).

Specifically, we will replace dashes “-” with an empty string (i.e. we will remove dashes from all products’ SKU), but you can of course readapt this and for example add suffixes, remove prefixes, replace special characters and so on. Enjoy!

WooCommerce: Item Custom Field @ Edit Order Page

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!

WooCommerce: Disable A Plugin For Customers / Shop Managers

Ok, this is an unusual snippet today, but it may happen that for performance / security / conflict / conditional / privacy reasons you may need a certain WooCommerce user role to not see / load / use a given plugin.

Let’s think of an example: as an administrator, you wish to use a CRM plugin to sync your order data to an external software. This plugin, however, does not have the ability to exclude Shop Managers from accessing it, and you don’t want to install yet another plugin to define who can access and who can not.

Another case scenario: Shop Managers and Administrators wish to use a live chat plugin, but they want to restrict the live chat visibility to logged in customers only, while logged out customers should not see anything, hidden code included.

There are a million reasons why this could be helpful. So, let’s see how to actually deactivate a plugin (not disable its scripts – but actually deactivate it) with a handy piece of code. Test it and only then – enjoy!

WooCommerce: Bulk Replace Product Inside Existing Orders

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!

WooCommerce: Add Custom Meta Box @ Order Admin

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!

WooCommerce: Additional “Store Address” @ General Settings

So, we all know that the “Store Address” fields under WooCommerce > Settings > General are used by other WooCommerce functions such as the initial setup wizard, currency switchers, language plugins as well as taxes and shipping calculations. Also, it may display on PDF invoices, WooCommerce emails and static pages.

This is all good and easy, but as usual businesses are not made equal. It could be that you need to show an additional address; for example, the “Warehouse Address”.

In this tutorial, we will add a new “Warehouse Address” section and address fields under the “Store Address” settings, and also see how we can easily retrieve this custom address so that you can display it anywhere. Enjoy!

WooCommerce: Resend Any Order Email

How annoying is the fact you can only resend the “New Order Notification” from the single order admin page? What if you’re testing out and customizing email templates, and need to email yourself the “processing” or the “completed” notification, without having to place a new test order or switching order status twice to re-trigger the notification?

Well, today we will see how to add a “Resend whatever email” function under the “order actions” on the single order edit page. Of course, make sure you switch the billing email to yours, otherwise the customer will get these emails and not you. Enjoy!

WooCommerce: Automatically Cancel Orders

You may wondering – “but I can already do that from the WooCommerce settings!“. Yes, that’s correct; go to WooCommerce Settings > Products > Inventory and set the “Hold Stock Minutes” value. After that period, unpaid orders will be marked as cancelled to make sure the stock goes back to the initial value.

The problem is – what if you don’t want to use the “Hold Stock Minutes” thing, and even better, what if you don’t use stock management at all? In that case, orders won’t be marked as cancelled automatically.

Also, what if you need to do conditional work e.g. you only want to cancel “failed” orders, while you want to keep “pending” ones as they are? Even in this case, the “hold stock” option won’t work, as you need to specify which order status you want to target and then run the cancel function.

Either way, enjoy!

WooCommerce: Disable Emails For a Single Order

This is a cool customization that can come useful for WooCommerce store admins, especially when they do manual order status changes via the Orders admin page.

As you know, each order status change triggers an order email (“processing”, “completed”, “on-hold”, etc.), and sometimes the store manager doesn’t want to resend them after each edit.

In this quick tutorial, we will see how to add a checkbox to the single order edit page, so that emails are disabled as long as the checkbox is kept checked. Enjoy!