WooCommerce 4.4 is publicly available since August 18, 2020! It has been in development since July 2020 and the core has been updated with about 450 commits from 24 contributors.
This is a minor release, which means everything is backward compatible with the previous version.
As always, WooCommerce recommends creating a backup of your site and making sure that themes and plugins are compatible before updating. You can check out this update guide for more information.
What’s new in 4.4?
As with all minor releases, we are bringing you several new features that we’d like to highlight:
WooCommerce Blocks Update
This release includes numerous bug fixes and improvements across various blocks. Some notable changes include –
- Updating styles across all blocks to make them more consistent and also removed usage of dashicon classes.
- Blocks respect the product image cropping settings.
- Scripts only relevant to the front-end display of blocks are no longer loaded in the editor.
Centralized Coupon Management
Coupons management has been moved to the marketing hub in the WordPress sidebar. There will still be a coupon menu item in the old location, and anyone stumbling upon it will be guided here.
See more details in the original release post.
Filters and actions
We have added a few new filters and updated some of the existing ones:
| Filters | Description |
|---|---|
| woocommerce_product_cross_sells_products_heading | Allows changing heading for cross selling product section. |
| woocommerce_enable_nocache_headers | Allows not setting no-cache headers to improve performance. |
| woocommerce_duplicate_product_exclude_meta | Added a new parameter $existing_meta_keys |
| plugins_update_check_locales | The default value of the $locales parameter changed to include all locales. |
| woocommerce_translations_updates_for_{$plugin_name} | Allows filtering plugin that are subscribed for automatic translation updates. |
| woocommerce_bacs_accounts | Added a new parameter $order_id |
New and changed filters
New action is also added in this release.
| Action | Description |
|---|---|
| woocommerce_order_note_added | Runs after a new note is added to the order. |
New Action
Other notable fixes and improvements
There are lots of fixes and stability improvements in this release, including:
- Fixed the visibility of partially out of stock variable products when using the layered nav widget.
- If you are manually creating a new order, stocks will be updated only after you have saved the order (in any status where stocks are supposed to be reduced like
on-hold,completedorprocessing). Earlier, stocks would have been reduced even if the order was not saved (as soon as products were added). - We have added/updated documentation of some deprecated functions.
- We have fixed a couple of issues that surfaced when using the upcoming version 5.5 of WordPress: removed new meta box arrows and fixed the “product type” dropdown from product’s data meta box.
- After clicking to update WooCommerce, the user will now stay in the same page instead of being redirected to the “Settings” page.
- Improved order details UI to highlight “Paid” and “Net Payment” sections.
- We removed the
JETPACK_AUTOLOAD_DEVdefine. - We now trigger the woocommerce_order_item_quantity filter when reserving stock.
Database changes
This release does not require any core database alteration. However, the previous release, 4.3, did introduce a new table, so if you are upgrading from an earlier release than 4.3, make sure that WordPress user has permission to add a new table to the database.
A re-occurring worker will be scheduled after update to backfill product variation data. This worker will process variable products in batches of 100.
Minimum WordPress Requirement
This version keeps the minimum WordPress version of 5.2 that was introduced in 4.2. Remember that you can read all about the new WordPress support policy in the developer blog post detailing it.
How was 4.4 tested?
We’ve been hard at work iterating on our testing procedures over the last few releases and we’re very satisfied with the level of stability we’ve managed to achieve in being so meticulous.
- We have decided to continue using an external agency. Their manual testing of our product on a variety of browsers and operating systems has proven effective in finding bugs before the release.
- We are still shifting some of the extensive testing upstream internally in order to decrease the feedback loop during WooCommerce Core releases.
- The shift to monthly releases has effectively decreases the testing surface, leading to smaller and more stable releases.
Much 💜 to all the contributors
WooCommerce thanks everyone in the community who has contributed via issue reports, fixes, translation, testing, supporting other users or simply spreading the word.
