For the last few months, I’ve been working on a new project within Automattic. I’m pretty excited that we announced the alpha testing phase for it today. It’s called WooCommerce Connect, and it’s a new way of delivering services to extend WooCommerce, the e-commerce plugin for WordPress.

With Connect, we’re simplifying the way that shop owners manage various services. Starting off with shipping today but eventually with various types of extensions, we’re bringing a better UX, less configuration, faster integrations and a modern codebase to the WooCommerce ecosystem.

You can read more about it in the official announcement, and help us shape the future by testing it out on your test or staging site today.

And if you’re a developer or just curious about the code, we’ve open sourced the plugin, which will eventually be included in WooCommerce core, so you can read it, get inspired and maybe even contribute to it. It does set a bit of precedent from a technological stack point of view as it uses React, Redux, Webpack, and other Javascript projects and integrates with Calypso components. You can read more about it in our developer blog post.

Make sure to sign up in the announcement post to get updates as we get closer to a final release!

I also gave a presentation about this and other tidbits about WooCommerce at WordCamp Vernon just a few days ago, the slides are at slides.jkudish.com and the video recording will be up in a few weeks.