For business
Apps for the people who run a business
An idea we are exploring: WordPress already runs a lot of businesses, through WooCommerce and everything built around it. What if the people doing the day-to-day work got apps made for their job, on that same WordPress, instead of the general-purpose admin? Two early experiments below, and some thoughts on where this could go.
Two experiments
Both are small, staff-facing front ends for WooCommerce. Each reads and writes through WooCommerce’s own data, keeps nothing of its own, and changes exactly one thing; everything else stays in wp-admin. They are prototypes of the idea, not finished products.
Availability Board
It is certainly possible to in WooCommerce to change the availability of inventory. But in wp-admin that’s Products → Edit → Inventory → Update, one item at a time.
At a restaurant you might need to do this multiple times per night. A dedicated app can make that easy and fast.
The demo seeds a small restaurant menu so the board isn’t empty.
Order Desk
Granted, an easier fulfilment screen can be had in the WooCommerce app. But in this experiment, we show how we could have a custom UI, finetuned to your business’s need.
The demo seeds a few sample orders so there is something to fulfill.
Where this could go
Task-shaped front ends. The full system stays underneath: WooCommerce with its products, orders, customers and extensions. On top, one small app per task, with its own URL, usable on a phone without training, and hard to break anything with because it only touches the one thing it is for.
Your own app, next to the others. A business could have an app built just for it, for a workflow nobody else has, and because it runs on the same WordPress it can use what the other apps already hold: the customers, the orders, the contacts, the notes. That is the connected data idea from the platform page, applied to a business.
None of this is limited to shops: a check-in desk over a membership plugin, a booking board over a calendar, a counter app over any data WordPress already holds. If you have a workflow like that, we would like to hear about it.
Try the idea on your own workflow
Both experiments are open source and built on WpApp, a small framework for giving a plugin its own app-like front end. Start from one of them, or describe the job your team actually does to an AI assistant and let it adapt the code.