The latest version of WooCommerce is a «minor» release to support shop owners with features for the upcoming data protection regulation (GDPR) on May 25. Besides the new features, over 50 fixes and changes for developers are in this version 3.4.
The GDPR features
- Like WordPress, WooCommerce now supports user data export and erasure. With anonymization tools and settings to enable automatic data cleanup, the new update helps a lot to comply with GDPR.
- The checkout page has also new settings in the Customizer to change chekout fields and policy notices.
- WooCommerce changed also the logging process to ensure personal data does not get logged.
- When you want to learn more about the necessary changes for the upcoming GDPR in your WooCommerce shop, you can visit woocommerce.com to find useful guidelines.
Geolocation
WooCommerce has now the ability to locate the users country via the MaxMind GeoLite2 database. This feature helps cusomers by automatically selecting the right country in the checkout process. In the past the old GeoLite database has been used, now WooCommerce supports GeoLite2 without any intervention by the shop owner.
Additional small features
- Shop owners with multiple sites can now see order information across sites with the multisite dashboard widgets.
- The coupon feature now has the possibility to restict coupons to groups of similar email adresses, for example only adresses with .edu could be allowed to use the coupon.
- Users can now set their display name on their My Account page.
- In the admin product search, the search for multiple products in the same query is now possible.
- For developers, the photoswipe style has now its own CSS file and a lot of new filters and actions have been added in this update to expand WooCommerces customizability.
The update should be compatible with versions of WooCommerce greater than 3.0. but a backup is as always a good idea.
