It has been 10 months since the WooCommerce team has gifted us with a major update like this. And we are very happy to see the new features and improvements that have been made in WooCommerce 3.0.
Before we talk about the news, we recommend you run a safe update process, or, if you don’t feel comfortable about the update process, ask us about how to update your site safely. This new version comes with a lot of features that could cause problems on your site, including incompatibilities with other plugins, themes and customisations.
What’s new on WooCommerce 3.0?
WooCommerce has 3 new big changes and several minor changes as well. The major changes are:
- A new product gallery, with a new zoom, gallery view and mobile improvements
- Additional CRUD classes
- And my favourite, a new CLI using the REST API.
The new product gallery
WooCommerce now provides a really cool gallery which will appear on individual product pages. Some of the features of this new gallery are:
- Magnification from the page, and zoom into the from a lightbox popup
- More intuitive behaviour for galleries with more than one image
- Touch gestures on mobile navigation
- Original image’s size when zooming in on it
Here’s a quick video demonstrating the new gallery…
Additional CRUD classes
This may sound you like a weird tech word, but CRUD stands for the four basic operations you can do to a resource: Create, Read, Update, and Delete. This has a lot of benefits for large stores with a high order volume. With the new CRUD improvements, WooCommerce Developers can now:
- Define the structured data for each resource
- Control the flow of data, and any validation needed
- Don’t need to know the internals of the data they’re working with, just the names
- Once abstracted, the data can be moved elsewhere, making migrating a lot easier
- Can use the same code for updating things as everything is unified
- Less code = less change to malfunction and more unit test coverage.
This is one of the updates that could cause the most problems on your site, so make sure to test before you update!
An awesome CLI tool
WooCommerce already has a CLI interface, but now this tool is powered by the REST API. This makes the plugin lighter and provides developers more power to frequently run tasks easily and quickly.
Here’s a list of commands that are now available:
And a lot of fun
3,646 commits separate the latest major update to the WooCommerce 3.0 update. That’s a lot of fun. Here are some of the other updates that have also been made:
- Performance improvements. WooCommerce uses taxonomies instead of post meta to determine and display product visibility, featured products, and out of stock products
- Sorting of tax rates is not automated, which makes easier to add and manage new tax zones
- User account improvements on WordPress network/multisite
- Cart percent and product percent coupon types are now one with merged functionality.
The Bionic Butterfly flying away
Are you ready to join the magic of the new WooCommerce update? If so, tell us what do you think about this new plugin, and if you need help upgrading your store, ping us and we will help you with this process.
