The new version of WooCommerce, WooCommerce 3.5 was released last week. WooCommerce 3.5 has been in development since the month of May and has had over 1512 commits from 98 contributors.
WooCommerce 3.5 is a minor update. This version is compatible with sites running versions of WooCommerce greater than or equal to 3.0. However, make sure your extensions and themes are compatible before upgrading and also, back them up for peace of mind.
With the new version, WooCommerce 3.5 has upgraded some of their major features.
What’s inside the new WooCommerce 3.5?
REST API v3
WooCommerce 3.5 has introduced the latest version of WooCommerce Rest API. It has added new endpoints and features to the existing endpoints. Inside REST API v3, you’ll find:
- A reviews endpoint to list, get, create, and update product reviews.
- Editable Date fields on the products endpoint, and updated the endpoint to work with the “on backorder” stock status introduced in WC 3.3.
- A series of new reports endpoints to get total counts of orders, products, customers, coupons, and reviews.
- Automatic total calculations when applying/removing coupons in the orders endpoint.
- New data endpoints to fetch Continents, Countries, and Currencies.
- Refund line items through the API.
- Query sort products by price, popularity, and rating.
- Query products and variations by stock_status.
- Ability to batch update settings.
Check out the API documentation for a complete list of the APU endpoints and their respective features.
Improved Copy for Transactional Emails
The wording of default transactional emails has been updated to be friendlier and less robotic. The newly improved default content for the transactional emails reduces the need for custom email templates and overrides, which will definitely result in better customer experience. The WooCommerce developers will be bringing out more improvements regarding WooCommerce emails and email content editing experience in the year 2019.
Exciting Features for Store Owners
Below are some of the features that will surely excite the store owners:
- You can now export products by category in the CSV exporter.
- You can now set a low-stock threshold for individual products.
- The payment method settings page has improved accessibility.
New Features for Store Builders and Developers
Here are some of the interesting features added in WooCommerce 3.5 for store builders and developers:
- The Action Scheduler library used by the WooCommerce Subscriptions plugin and other WooCommerce plugins is now included in WooCommerce core. It provides a robust, scalable background processing solution for developers.
- Support for the Custom Product Tables feature Also, the team is working on custom database tables to store product data and improve the performance and scalability of WooCommerce. This release has added the hooks and filters required by the feature plugin. Read more.
- Added support for the wc-admin feature plugin. The team is working on the modernization of the WooCommerce admin experience. This release has added the API endpoints required by the feature plugin. Read more.
- Added many new filters and actions to increase the customizability of WooCommerce.
The “Preview Changes” button was removed from the publish meta box when editing products in version 3.5. So, if you’re missing it, Rémi Corson has published a quick CSS snippet to bring it back.
WooCommerce 3.5 is a minor update and is compatible with sites running any version of WooCommerce greater than or equal to 3.0. Test and back up prior to upgrading just for safety.
Check out the release post with a full list of interesting features and enhancements in WooCommerce 3.5 here. And if you have anything to share with us, let us know through the comments section.
Reference: WooCommerce