I have seen this question pop up a couple of times, and I do want to ask how you plan to address this? Automattic has said they plan to make drastic changes to WooCommerce (or at least the Dashboard). How long will WooCommerce be compatible with ClassicPress? Are there plans to fork this too? I am sorry if these questions appear dumb, I just haven’t been far into the WordPress community and ‘lore’ to really understand how this all fits together yet. While most of our sites are not webshops, and most of our webshops run Magento, there are a few WooCommerce sites among them, and I need to know what their future is before we can switch those to CP.
We had a really detailed discussion here: Woocommerce and ClassicPress
At the end it came down to, the following.
We don’t really know, things could change overnight. It is owned by Automattic so no real guarantees.
We really don’t have the manpower to support a second fork. However, we would support someone if they decided to.
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Thank you for the answer! For now we will refrain from moving the WooCommerce sites then just to be sure.
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This issue is actually my biggest concern keeping me from flipping my sites. Over the years, I’ve built some extensive custom shopping sites with woocommerce and none of the replacements mentioned in the other thread will work for them. Some of the shops have hundreds of items and it’s not reasonable to use an offsite shopping cart that charges a monthly fee based on the number of items in the shop.
Unless a solid replacement for WooCommerce is found that allows you to host your own products and process orders on your own site, I can’t flip many of the sites I run to ClassicPress and will have to suffer through Gutencrap for those particular sites which would be a bummer to say the least.
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As long as WooCommerce remains compatible with WordPress 4.9.x, OR as long as you don’t upgrade to the latest versions of WooCommerce.
Staying on an older version is not recommended, but many people do anyway because upgrading WooCommerce often requires a significant amount of expert-level work.
As noted above, we don’t have control over how long WooCommerce will remain compatible with WordPress 4.9.x, and therefore with ClassicPress.
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I am
In the same boat and wondering if there is a downside to remaining on 4.9 (with security updates) until such time as security updates to Woocommerce and other crucial plugins force some kind of a decision
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I’m not sure what are the Woocommerce team plans/vison for the future but there are so many plugins/themes ( I would say thousands ) built around the current code (hooks and filters) that I find it hard for them to change the current structure.
So maybe their approach will be able to have a different alternative ( classic vs new ) to adjust settings and manage products.
This isn’t just a ClassicPress “problem”. The same can be considered for WordPress with the current Woocommerce themes/plugins ecosystem that will have to adapt in the future (but it will take time).
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Right, and this is already an existing problem specifically for the WooCommerce ecosystem.
The WooCommerce 2.7 release introduced new CRUD classes for all major data operations. This was a huge breaking change, enough that the team eventually decided to release it as version 3.0.0 to make it clearer.
Even sticking with WordPress, there is a lot that needs to be done to successfully upgrade from WooCommerce 2.6 to 2.7/3.0. See this guide for some examples, and that is definitely not an exhaustive list (here’s another more specific issue that can cause breakage during that particular WooCommerce upgrade).
So, as long as WooCommerce remains compatible with WordPress 4.9.x, ClassicPress doesn’t change anything here. A bigger issue for WooCommerce site owners is compatibility between WooCommerce and other plugins.
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Very good points.
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But this is a big worry for me, with three or four WooCommerce sites. How can we know that updates in Woocommerce (even in the near future) won’t force WP version 5?
This is currently stopping me form jumping over to CP, much as I’d like to.
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I’d suggest asking the WooCommerce team (via a GitHub issue) if they are going to keep support for WordPress 4.9.x in new versions, as many people will not be upgrading. If they can do that, then that makes our part much easier.
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Thanks, I will ask them via a ticket, I don’t know what a GitHub issue is.
However whatever they say may not actually be what happens of course.
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If someone (cough) was crazy enough to fork WooCommerce, what would this kind of support look like?
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I think that would be something we (the committee) would need to clearly define and chat about.
Are you thinking of becoming that crazy person? 
I’ve been thinking of becoming that crazy person for a while now, even before these conversations started.
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@parkerj Just to say that you are not alone in this, already heard that from a few persons(myself included) 
I think it will happen at some point but it could be soon now. At the moment there aren’t any issues in running Woocommerce in ClassicPress.
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@parkerj the good news is that you have a lot of freedom to undertake this effort as you see fit. The bad news is that we wouldn’t be able to provide much official help or support right now, beyond giving you a place to put the code if you want, and maybe some commiseration mutual learning about all the things that need to be done to successfully fork large projects.
Are you thinking of forking WooCommerce yourself, or under the ClassicPress name?
If the former, well, you don’t need anything from us to get started 
If the latter, we could use the ClassicPress Research · GitHub organization and create a repository there. This is a semi-official place for experimental plugins that may one day be official recommendations from within the ClassicPress dashboard, or even integrated into the core software (not as likely in this case).
Either way, if you’re able to create and stay on top of a fork of WooCommerce, then kudos to you. And either way, what will ultimately determine the success of the project is whether members of the community choose to use it on their sites.
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Definitely under the ClassicPress name.
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Ok, so I just need your GitHub username (feel free to send me a direct message here, or on Slack or Discord if you don’t want to share it publicly) and the repository name.
Repository name: ClassicCommerce? Something else?