WooCommerce 3.5 & New Features

WooCommerce is now becoming a very important plugin for e-commerce WordPress website. Luckily, the Woo Dev Team always pay much effort to update new features, improvements and bug fixes to complete their product.

Some days ago, WooCommerce 3.5 is available for beta testing. Now let’s see the highlight features of this new version.

About WooCommerce 3.5  Update

• 3.5 is a minor release, all new functionality should exist in a backwards-compatible manner. Updating from any version since 3.0 should be hassle free! However, you should test and back up your website before upgrading.
• If you are curious about some changes in files and functions in 3.5, you could check the beta version here.

Rest API ready, improved transactional emails, custom product tables and lots of new features will be available in the next version WooCommerce 3.5.

REST API v3 Ready

The latest version of the WooCommerce REST API is ready, and features new endpoints as well as improvements to existing endpoints. Some of the new features include:

• A reviews endpoint to list, get, create, and update product reviews.
• Date fields are now editable on the products endpoint, and the endpoint has been updated to work with the “on backorder” stock status.
• A series of new reports endpoints to get total counts of orders, products, customers, coupons and reviews.
• New orderby options for the products endpoint to allow listing products by price, popularity, or rating.
• Automatic total calculations when applying/removing coupons in the orders endpoint.

More documentation around the new version of the REST API will be available within the next few weeks.

Improved copy for transactional emails

The team has improved the wording of the WooCommerce transactional emails to be friendlier and more human. This will also improve the customer experience and reduce the need for store owners to do template overrides of the transactional emails.

This is the first phase of a larger initiative to improve WooCommerce’s emails and email content editing experience. More improvement will be promising next year.

Custom Product Tables support

The use of the postmeta database table for storing product information has been a big bottleneck when scaling WooCommerce stores. The Woo team has migrated the product information that WooCommerce currently stores in the postmeta table to custom database tables developed and optimized for product data. This will provide large performance boosts to stores and greatly improve their scalability.

The 3.5 release will add the hooks and filters required for the Custom Product Tables feature plugin to WooCommerce. Currently the feature plugin is in beta, but it will be production ready soon-enough, and WooCommerce stores will be prepared.

In the meantime, this will make it easy to beta test the feature plugin and see what sort of performance gains your store will get. Please follow beta testing best practices and don’t test on production systems, as the custom tables plugin has the potential to cause loss of data.

Everything else . . .

Other features include:

• The ability to export products by category in the CSV exporter.
• The ability to set a low stock threshold for individual products.
• An improved payment method settings page with greater accessibility among other accessibility improvements.
• Error logging for transactional emails using the WooCommerce logger.
• The Action Scheduler background processing library used by the WooCommerce Subscriptions plugin is now included in WooCommerce and provides a robust, scalable background processing solution for developers. In 3.5 webhooks will be delivered using this library.
• Numerous performance improvements.

On top of the new features, there are a variety of minor tweaks, new hooks, and fixes. You can see the full list here.

Release schedule

The WooCommerce 3.5 is intended to kept in beta for the next 2 weeks for developer to check if the extensions and themes are compatible to be safe.

• September 26th: Release Candidate 1
• October 17th: Target launch

Our WPThemeGo team also have planned to update our WordPress themes  to latest version of WooCommerce plugin. Please stay tuned!