WooCommerce 3.0 “Bionic Butterfly” brings Major Improvements

WooCommerce 3.0

The newest version of WooCommerce, WooCommerce 3.0 has been released on April 4. This is the first major release since the plugin was switched to semantic versioning in 2.7. WooCommerce 3.0 spent more than three months in beta version and an extended RC testing period that allowed extension and developers enough time to speed up, and has now come up named as “Bionic Butterfly”.

With the new version, WooCommerce 3.0 has upgraded some of their major features, which includes:

  • Speed and Performance Improvements
  • A new CLI
  • Added CRUD classes
  • An Updated Product Gallery

What’s inside the new improvements to WooCommerce 3.0?

Speed and Performance Improvements

WooCommerce 3.0 has come up with impressive speed and performance improvements. If you have a larger store with many products or many variations, you will notice the differences quicker.

There are two major enhancements in speed and performance:

  • taxonomies instead of the slower post meta for features like product visibility, featured products, and out of stock products
  • reduced number of queries for upsells and related products on product and cart pages to speed up their performance

A New CLI

Version 3.0 also introduces a new command line surface (CLI) powered by the REST API. Previously, the WooCommerce CLI was powered by its own code separate from the REST API. There are certain things possible in REST API which are not possible with the WooCommerce CLI.

Major benefits in new CLI:

  • reduces the amount of code to maintain
  • provides you with more power, which means the commands will always be current.

Added CRUD Classes

WooCommerce 3.0 has introduced CRUD (Create, Read, Update and Delete) classes for the developers to optimize data storage with less code. So basically, WooCommerce 3.0 provides all the four basic operations one can do to a resource. It also enhances the way WooCommerce handles scalability for eCommerce websites.

Here are some benefits to this addition:

  • Less code means fewer changes and more tests
  • You will now only need to know the names of the data you’re working with, instead of the types or internal details.
  • You can modify orders, products, customers, line items, shipping zones, payment tokens, and coupons with less code across a unified system.
  • The data can be moved elsewhere without affecting the existing code.

An Updated Product Gallery

WooCommerce 3.0 brings an updated product gallery with improved functionality, gallery view and more mobile friendly than the previous version.

You’ll find:

  • Galleries in 3.0 supports multiple images and clicking on a thumbnail updates the image without forcing it to open in a popup window.
  • It is also more mobile friendly supporting touch gestures, including swipe options, zooming options and more.

With all these improvements, WooCommerce is providing a faster and easier experience for all the users.

Why the upgrade was so necessary?

The WooCommerce upgrade was much awaited. Many of the WooCommerce users were complaining about the slow server. That was one of the main reasons why most people would not choose WooCommerce over any other platform.

Website owners with more than 10 thousand subscribers experienced server bugging often and also required a dedicated server with high RAM only for WooCommerce in the older version.

The scalability improvements in this version was a much needed change in WooCommerce to improve the bugs in server.

Regarding the same problems, the founder of Catch Themes, Sakin Shrestha said, “We use WooCommerce for Catch Themes, and had been experiencing server crashes and slowdown. Therefore, for ThemePalace, we decided upon Easy Digital Downloads. There were no server problems in ThemePalace even though the server for ThemePalace is slower than that of Catch Themes.” He added, “Up until now, I wouldn’t choose WooCommerce or call it a good plugin, but the upgrade to 3.0 has made WooCommerce so much better and I’m happy that now we won’t experience problems.”

With all these improvements, there is a possibility that we might see WooCommerce in WordPress.com soon.

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