Automattic, the company behind one of world’s most popular CMS platforms WordPress (which happens to run this site today), has announced the acquisition of WooCommerce, a popular plugin for WordPress powered websites to help them set up an e-commerce site in minutes.
WooCommerce’s popularity can be judged from the fact that it ranks up in top 10 most popular plugins in WordPress’s database, even though it is a highly feature-specific one. The plugin has already helped in setting up as many as 600,000 storefronts. The plugin has raked up over 7.5 Million downloads.
Announcing the acquisition, WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg said,
Someone stood up in the Q&A and asked me ‘When are you going to make it as easy to publish stores online as you’ve made it to publish websites?’… and there was spontaneous applause from the audience. People loved this idea.
So what exactly is WooCommerce ? Well, it is a WordPress plugin which lets you put an e-commerce storefront in a matter of minutes. What makes WooCommerce even more interesting, is the fact that the plugin has been developed by a bunch of WordPress developers who have been associated with the CMS platform by designing themes for the same. Thus, the storefronts which come up via WooCommerce are great on design front too, something which people developers generally crib about most other plugins.
To know more about WooCommerce, you can have a look at this demo video :
This however,isn’t the first time that Automattic has acquired a software from its own Plugins repository. It had earlier acquired BruteProtect, an enterprise class security provider plugin for WordPress
