WooCommerce 3.3 was released on January 30. It contains new features as well as bug fixes. The update can be installed either through the automatic updating process like we do on openstream.ch or manually. It shouldn’t create any issues, but it is still not declared as stable. You can wait a few days till it is declared as stable, because there are no security enhancements in the update.
The new features
- The Orders Screen has been made simpler and at the same time more useful. Old extensions should still work because of the backwards compatibility.
- The Status and stock managment is now more intuitive and has more automation features.
- WooCommerce has now a greater theme support through rendering the store content inside of the theme’s post content area. Because of the improvement, you should now be able to use almost any of the themes from WordPress.org. Themes which aren’t declared as WooCommerce themes could now be used without an issue.
- With the update, you can use the Customizer to set the number of rows and columns in the shop.
- The aspect ration of images can now be changed by the Customizer. The thumbnails are now also automatically regenerated in the background.
- Product downloads are logged and can be analyzed and filtered.
- The `products` shortcode now has pagination and tag support.
- Live preview of shop display settings in the Customizer.
- Webhooks now use the CRUD design pattern like in other classes.
- New sample data for easily populating shops with demo content.
- Added sandbox and live API details to the PayPal standard data, as well as an indication on the checkout to what mode is currently active.
- Ability to search in logs when the database logger is used.
A lot of additional changes are in the update, especially bug fixes and theme changes which make it possible to use almost all WordPress themes from wordpress.org together with WooCommerce. More information can be found in the WooCommerce Blog.
Remember to create a backup before installing any update.
(«WooCommerce» butterfly picture courtesy of Pexels)
