Get Woocommerce to Manage Stock as a default

Question

Is there a hook that would allow setting the Inventory > Manage Stock checkbox in woocommerce globally?

All my products are single item quantity, so it seems pretty counter-D.R.Y to always have to remember to check it, especially for other employees.

Answer 1

Although this is quite late, since you asked about a hook: although there doesn't appear to be a hook, action or function specifically for turning on the Manage Stock option, you can still hook into the post save function and auto-enable it that way, since it is just a post_meta value:

add_action('save_post', 'myWoo_savePost', 10, 2);

function myWoo_savePost($postID, $post) {
    if (isset($post->post_type) && $post->post_type == 'product') {

        update_post_meta($post->ID, '_manage_stock', 'yes');
    }
}

Note that stock levels will always default to 0, so you may also want to add the line:

update_post_meta($post->ID, '_stock', '1');

...which will update your stock quantity to 1. Do be aware that this will happen every time a product is saved, though.

I'm unsure as to whether this has knock-on effects elsewhere in WooCommerce for larger stock quantities, but as you're dealing with single-quantity items, I'd guess you're probably okay.

Update (with $update):

As of Wordpress 3.7, a third parameter was added to save_post so you can easily tell if it's a new post being created or an existing post being updated. As such, you can fire the function above only when creating a new post (which is arguably the desired effect):

add_action('save_post_product', 'myWoo_savePost', 10, 3);

function myWoo_savePost($postID, $post, $update) {
    if (!$update) {
        //  $update is false if we're creating a new post
        update_post_meta($post->ID, '_manage_stock', 'yes');
        update_post_meta($post->ID, '_stock', '1');
    }
}

(Thanks to Dylan for the reminder about post-type specific saves)