u/Asyranok

This is basically framed as a mix between the context of what I am asking mixed with a pitch for the current product.

I've helped a friend develop his business' WordPress website since he has no programming experience. I've never developed a WordPress website before until this, and am learning PHP and the WP toolsets and plugins.

One thing that became clear early on is that it is utterly impossible to manually update products to have the correct categories and images since his business imports product data on a constant 20 minute interval. Things like categories are overwritten during product updates, and new products use different standards and setup from a large variety of different vendors.

So I developed a plugin to automate this process. It finds and fixes a bunch of issues, though most of these arise from the fact that this is a large product base, where the product data is sent from a variety of suppliers with different standards.

I want to eventually put this plugin on the plugin store for free, in the hopes it can make other people's lives easier too. But I want to add more value to it for people who do not have larger product lists being imported from a bunch of vendors/suppliers, which is not going to be a majority of WordPress websites.

I am posting a synopsis of the plugin below, but would love people's opinions on testing and fixing tools that would be valuable to you based on the types of WordPress websites you host and develop?

TEST THE WOO (TTW)

A quality assurance plugin that tests your WooCommerce products and reports on a number of issues, offering automated fixes as products are added to the database, or quick one-button-press fixed for all of the issues that it finds.

I am building a tool out of necessity for one of the websites I am developing for. This is particularly helpful for a website that imports product data that you do not have control over at the source.

Common problems with incoming data?

• There may be no images
• The images may be way too small, not tailored specifically for WooCommerce
  • WooCommerce will stretch them in various ways that look terrible
• Incoming categorization is not always going to categorize things the way you want to organize products
  • Sometimes, the categories are entirely too generic and impossible to associate with your WooCommerce pages
• When reorganizing product categories happens, without a tool to do it, you have to batch edit products to add their parent categories - but TTW does it for you in one pass

So how do you fix these problems?

• Testing tools to locate them, with a per-basis fix or a mass fix approach
• Fixing tools that instantly fix several issues, with customization on what is identified as needing a fix, and custom ways to fix them
• AI integration for products completely missing images, to find the product’s image via Google, and offer links to available images
  • You can select from a set of found images, and they will be downloaded and attached to the product

How does category fixing work?

There are two approaches to fixing categories in TTW. One is a simple fix, where incoming products contain one category, which is mapped to a new category that you use in your shop.

This is as simple as…

Incoming Category: sconce-wall-light — Your Category: light-fixtures

Incoming Category: ceiling-lights — Your Category: light-fixtures

But there is also a tool for more complex conversions. Sometimes, incoming products have no appropriate categories to identify specifically what product type they are. This tool allows you to determine the category you want to apply via several product meta data items.

Here’s an example scenario:

Incoming Product:

Name: Outdoor solar lights for sidewalks and gardens

Categories: lights

Attributes:

–lightType:solar,outdoor–

–specialLightType:flickering-torch–

Desired Categories:

Light-fixtures,solar-lights,outdoor-lights,flickering-torch

TTW let’s you map incoming data to final categories using multiple checks. You can do “title contains” and/or “description contains” and/or “attribute exists and contains”, “has existing categories”, and more. These mappings guarantee that incoming data can smartly and automatically be triaged and updated in a way that sets these products up exactly the way you want.

You need test coverage?!

A more complex website, or websites with constant updates, require good automated test coverage. Test The Woo enables that with ease. We use Playwright as a test runner to help you easily generate test code and to quickly address issues.

A webcrawler will test all publicly accessible pages and report on standard errors and page load issues.

These tools use your desktop as a launching platform, since a website and its server cannot launch them. These tools use Chromium (or any browser you instruct them to use), to launch a browser instance that then executes your tests.

Test The Woo communicates with your local test execution to minimize the technical effort involved in this process, telling your local Playwright to launch tests and communicate results back to TTW for display.

--------------------------------------

The integrations with AI for finding the correct product images, and the whole pipeline/approach to supporting Playwright is not started yet. The other tools are first-pass done; being tested and retested for bug fixing and missing functionality.