Call for testing the new coming soon mode

[adrianduffell]

We are planning to introduce a new coming soon mode to WooCommerce in an upcoming version. This aims to allow new merchants to build their store in private, while growing their online presence with a coming soon page. It is coupled with a new "Launch Your Store" setup task which aims to give users more confidence taking their store live.

What to test

If you have a moment, we’d love to hear your feedback! Specifically, we’d love to hear how you find using the new "Site visibility" settings tab and templates for the coming soon mode. The nightly build of WooCommerce contains the feature. Just upload woocommerce-trunk-nightly.zip into a suitable test environment or spin up a WP Playground!

Once the nightly is uploaded, a new badge appears on the WooCommerce Admin home screen, indicating the status of the site and providing a dropdown to quickly access these features.

Site visibility settings

The coming soon mode is controlled by a new tab in WooCommerce settings.

When in coming soon mode, additional toggles appear.

• Restrict to store pages only. This is useful for merchants installing WooCommerce on an existing site. Only the WooCommerce store-related pages will be protected by the coming soon mode.
• Share your site with a private link. This allows merchants to share the progress of their new store with friends, family, and colleagues without them needing to login as an admin user.

Existing stores will default to live mode, while new stores that complete the profiler will default to coming soon mode. The following logic dictates whether the coming soon protection applies to the whole site or is restricted to store pages only:

• Default to whole site, If the site is fresh (as determined by the fresh_site WordPress flag), and the first admin user registration date is less than a month ago.
• Otherwise, enable the "Restrict to store pages only" toggle.

Please try switching between live and coming soon modes. Does the front-end change appropriately? If not, what hosting setup do you have? Note: you will need to view the front-end as a non-admin user (use a private window or another browser).

Coming soon templates

Don't like the purple? The coming soon page template is fully-customizable in the WordPress Editor.

How easy/difficult do you find editing this template? We intend for the editing experience to be as close to 1:1 with the front-end as possible. If you find something that doesn't render properly on the front-end, let us know and state the theme being used.

Additionally, when the "Restrict to store pages only" toggle is enabled, the template will adjust to the active theme and render a header or footer.

Known issues

• There may be conflicts with other coming soon modes provided by hosts and other plugins.

Over to you!

Thanks for contributing and helping to shape this feature! All feedback is much appreciated.

[Brianmitchtay]

Everything worked as expected for me in my test on an established localhost install using WPLocal to run the site.

Having any Woo page (e.g. cart, checkout) go to the coming soon template is pretty slick. Excited to see this ship!

As far as editing the template goes it took me a while to figure out that the background color was not set as an actual style, but was a setting on the "Coming Soon" block. I was expecting to find the setting in the styles for the coming soon block, not the settings for it. But I found it eventually all the same.

[webdados]

I don't think "Site visibility" needs its own tab on WooCommerce settings. Tabs are premium real estate.
Two options could be easily integrated into the General tab or as a sub-section of Advanced.

[jamesckemp]

We decided to give it its own tab because of a few reasons (we discussed it extensively and created a few design scenarios 😅):

1. The settings are using a dynamic implementation and newer design. When added to the "General" tab, they sat out of line with all the other settings and looked odd. We considered adding a "Site Visibility" label to push them inline, but it just meant duplicating labels and added confusion.
2. When using the WooCommerce menu item to "Manage Visibility", there was no reliable way to locate the correct settings when they were mixed among the other "General" settings.

I was also reluctant to add an additional tab, but it gave the best experience in the end. However, happy to hear any ideas you might have to combat the two issues mentioned above?

[webdados]

I don't have ideas to tackle the two issues mentioned, and it seems you already did that work. It just seems a waste of premium space to have a tab just for this.

[jamesckemp]

I would expect the whole settings area to be revamped at some point, more in line with this new setting. I'll definitely keep a look out for similar feedback to see if we need to revisit the decision, though.

[cre8tivediva]

Is "Site" the entire site or the "Store". If the Store, I'd recommend changing to "Store Visibility". I also agree with @webdados to pull it off the Settings tab. I wouldn't want them to "hunt" for it. But with most "maintenance" type plugins that I've worked with, they have it as a toggle on the Admin Bar across the top. And, at the two additional arrows, they reference "site" vs. "store". If it's really the store, having "site" could be confusing.

[jamesckemp]

It's the entire site unless you enable "Restrict to store pages only", then it's only the store!

[cre8tivediva]

Hummm, that's great to know then so I can test with other maintenance plugins that I have installed.

[adrianduffell]

Thanks @cre8tivediva , I would love to know the results of your testing with other maintenance plugins once you're done. We plan to avoid clashes with these next.

[cre8tivediva]

@adrianduffell sure! I have two more I can test on this one.

[alexstandiford]

It would also be nice to set this up to optionally redirect to an existing page instead. That way if your home page is the same landing page as what you'd want people to see for this "coming soon" page, it would work.

PS: I would be using this right now if I could. Such a great idea.

[cre8tivediva]

I also agree with @alexstandiford . What would the response code be on coming soon if it's not redirected? How would that be handled between "site" and "store"?

[jamesckemp]

That's a good question for @adrianduffell to answer!

[psealock]

Thats a great idea @alexstandiford. @adrianduffell, I think we can add a filter here so folks can redirect to a template of their choice. I'm not sure off the top of my head how you might redirect to an existing page, but surely its possible.

woocommerce/plugins/woocommerce/src/Internal/ComingSoon/ComingSoonRequestHandler.php

Lines 44 to 46 in 36fa4f8

	if ( ! $this->should_show_coming_soon( $wp ) ) {
	return $template;
	}

@cre8tivediva the response code on the coming soon pages are 200 after they are redirected. It won't be possible to access site or store pages in coming soon mode. Does that answer your question?

[cre8tivediva]

@psealock yes, that's great on response code.

[alexstandiford]

Thats a great idea @alexstandiford. @adrianduffell, I think we can add a filter here so folks can redirect to a template of their choice. I'm not sure off the top of my head how you might redirect to an existing page, but surely its possible.

I would probably do it using get_post_permalink and wp_redirect.

Does the request handler run inside template_redirect? If so, I think what I'm suggesting would work fine.

[cre8tivediva]

Another suggestion that might not be as exhausting to create the Coming Soon page, would be to allow users to create their own and select it like they do the remainder of the pages. Maybe put a "Coming Soon" or "Site Visibility" area on that page. This way if they want to create customized pages at various times or swap them out, they'd only need to create it and then set the page here. But there would be a default like what's there now but add this so they have an option.

[cre8tivediva]

I did a walk through via video - https://www.screencast.com/t/YykSpLfi

On Site Visibility - Coming Soon, I'd would have that open because as you can see from my video, I was confused. What I was seeing didn't look like the image above. There are quite a few users who might also get confused if they do not see the toggles at first glance when they go to the Settings page.

---

How can the message on the Shop page be modified? I know from my own audience of users, that will be the first thing they look for or send a message seeking how to change. I offer tech support and provide theme support and I can pretty much bet that will be one of the first questions a user will contact support for.

---

When setting the "Shop only" to Coming Soon mode, if an existing site has products on the front or WooCommerce products blocks scattered around, i.e., on other pages, sidebar, etc., they'll need to be reminded to remove that section from their site. I was expecting that area to disappear or render some sort of message on the block, not stay Live. At the 3:28 mark I said this section was Kadence but it's not. It's the default "Newest Products" Block in WooCommerce. So if that was left there and they turned on Coming Soon mode, shouldn't these products disappear? Shouldn't there be a message like on the Shop page?

[ilyasfoo]

Hey, @cre8tivediva! Thanks so much for sharing your feedback! However, the screencast link you've provided has a passphrase to access.

How can the message on the Shop page be modified? I know from my own audience of users, that will be the first thing they look for or send a message seeking how to change. I offer tech support and provide theme support and I can pretty much bet that will be one of the first questions a user will contact support for.

Good question! The can be edited when you're using a FSE theme, by going to Apperance > Editor > Templates > Page: Coming soon. Currently, the template to be edited will depend on your settings for Restrict to store pages only.

This information should be included in our documentation when it's ready.

So if that was left there and they turned on Coming Soon mode, shouldn't these products disappear? Shouldn't there be a message like on the Shop page?

That's a great question. So far we haven't decided on having restrictions on blocks-level elements. My personal opinion is that it can be a little overreaching, and it may not be technically simple to do.

[cre8tivediva]

On the Private Link, it works, however, when I toggle it off, the Save button doesn't activate. When I go to he site incognito that link is still Live. Should the Save button light up to save turning off the Preview? I cleared the cache in the site and browser and the Shop still appears. I think I need to be able to save it.

[adrianduffell]

Hmm, the save button should light up after toggling the private link or any of the settings. Could you please share more details about your environment (browser, operating system, host) and we'll investigate further.

[cre8tivediva]

So this is interesting. I've been testing in Firefox with Enhanced Tracking Protection "off". The button wouldn't light up. I just went to Chrome, logged in. Turned the link on, Saved. Then toggle it off. Saved. I went back over to Firefox, toggled and it wouldn't activate. I refreshed the page toggled it on and the button lit up, then toggled it off and the button lit up. I wonder if there's some other caching? This site is on PHP 7.4.33, so I might need to restore this site from before I started tinkering with it. Bump up to 8.2 to see if it still happens. I'll keep you posted.

[cre8tivediva]

I started over, bumped up to 8.2. I didn't have the button issue in Firefox anymore. However, in Firefox the cache won't flush so the Shop stays on even though Coming Soon is on. I even flushed my DNS through terminal. But it works right in Chrome.

Firefox 125.0.3 (64-bit) (needs an update)
Chrome 24.0.6367.208 (Official Build) (64-bit)

SiteGround hosting

[cre8tivediva]

@adrianduffell I just created a brand new staging on WPE. And I noticed after going back and forth toggling on and off settings, that there's caching going on. I am Live testing in Firefox but checking the site in FireFox Incognito. And when I toggle the settings - I have to clear the WPE caching for the pages to go offline or to come back online. More testing might be needed on various hosting platforms. Will there be a way to cache exclude any functionality in this? I'm going to turn off "object cache" to see if that helps.

[cre8tivediva]

I added these to the cache exclusions:

^/shop-2/
^/cart-2/

And they worked without clearing the cache, but unfortunately the home page was still displaying when I turned coming soon on the entire site. I still needed to clear the WP Engine cache for that to go offline.

[ilyasfoo]

Thanks so much for testing this out! In our current state, we have not considered cache busting mechanism on coming soon mode settings change. We'll look into this further.

Edit: Actually, we do have a cache-busting mechanism in place. We'll look into why it's not working, I suspect that hosts may have their own way to invalidate caches.

[thisissandip]

With themes not using the Site Editor, when we click on the "Editor" link to customize the landing page, it shows an error:

And, in the frontend, we see the "Coming Soon" template is added along with the header and footer:

In that case, the only option is to either use a theme with Site Editor to edit the template or not to use the Site Visibility Settings.

[psealock]

With themes not using the Site Editor, when we click on the "Editor" link

Which editor link did you click? It shouldn't be visible from the side navigation:

Nor would it be available from the homescreen badge:

[thisissandip]

I had the link open while using the TT4 theme and tried to refresh with SF theme active that's when I came across that.

For stores using themes like SF, do users need to switch to a Site Editor-compatible theme to edit the "Coming Soon" template?

[psealock]

For stores using themes like SF, do users need to switch to a Site Editor-compatible theme to edit the "Coming Soon" template?

yes, thats right.