A2 Woo Details Excel

The business problem

Order operations lived outside WooCommerce, so the packing spreadsheet and the store disagreed constantly. The obvious fix is custom fields, but eight postmeta rows per order across a large order table makes the admin list slow, and postmeta gives you no clean way to render a sortable column or export a range. The data needed a real home.

What I delivered

• a2-woo-details-exel.php, a 2,168-line MU plugin that provisions its own table rather than writing eight postmeta rows per order.
• Eight operational columns rendered directly in the orders list, with the widths tuned so the checkbox fields read as a scannable grid.
• A modal editor opened from the order row, with a Jalali date picker for the shipping date because that is the calendar the team works in.
• A managed stock-location list stored as an option, editable from the modal, so warehouse locations are a dropdown rather than free text that drifts.
• XLSX export over the current filter, so a date range or status selection in the admin becomes a file the accounting team can use.
• An order note recording which user saved which change, so the fields carry the same accountability as the rest of the order history.
• Support for both the legacy post-based orders screen and HPOS, since the two use entirely different column hooks.

Technical approach

• The custom table is the decision the rest follows from. Columns render with one read per screen instead of eight postmeta lookups per row, and export becomes a query rather than a loop.
• Schema changes are versioned and checked at most every six hours rather than on every admin load, so the install check does not become its own overhead.
• Everything writes through nonce-protected AJAX endpoints; there is no form post path that could be replayed.
• Both column hooks are registered at priority 9999 so the fields land after whatever the theme and other plugins have already done to that table.
• Export runs behind an overlay with its own progress state, because a large range is slow enough that a silent wait reads as a broken button.

Result and evidence

Order operations moved into WooCommerce. The parallel spreadsheet is gone, which removes the reconciliation step it used to require, and the fields are now visible to everyone who opens the order rather than to whoever had the file open.

Commercial value

This is the kind of internal tooling that does not appear in any feature list but decides whether a team ships orders accurately. It replaced a manual process with one that is auditable by default.