I’ve heard and read about WordPress backward compatibility, but in the last weeks, I got a bit of free time to refresh the 10-year-old WooCommerce plugin - Woo Product Add Tab. The last release 0.8 was created on Oct 1, 2015. It required WordPress 3.0.1 and WooCommerce 2.4.6. How does it work now with WordPress 6.7 and WooCommerce 9.5?

First of all, the plugin still makes sense. Despite Site Editor support, WooCommerce still doesn’t provide a possibility to create custom product tabs.

Second, the plugins still work! You can check the PR here - https://github.com/shvlv/woo-product-add-tab/pull/1. The single actual change is replacing the deprecated hook woocommerce_product_write_panels with woocommerce_product_data_panels. While the old one still works(!) as well. Other changes include small bug fixes and appearance adjustments.

Summary. WordPress and WooCommerce provide super-backward compatibility. The 10-year-old PHP 5.6 code still works almost without changes. The hook deprecated in version 2 still works for version 9 :).

Regarding the plugin itself, the plan is to improve it step-by-step according to the common development standards and add the block editor support. Let’s see how it goes.