WooCommerce users can finally utilize the long foreseen 3.0 update. Yes, that is right WooCommerce 3.0 is here. With more than 22,189,854 downloads, WooCommerce is proud to be the backbone of nearly 28% of online stores making it the most popular e-commerce platform. The update is set to make the overall experience smooth. And, now the new version comes with:

  • Totally New Product Gallery with new mobile features, zoom and gallery views.
  • The new addition of CRUD classes.
  • Brand new CLI powered by the REST API.
  • High-level improvements in performance and speed.

Although these are some of the main highlights of the WooCommerce 3.0 update, there is more to discuss. So read further to know more.

Why Release 3.0 instead of 2.7?

Obvious, after 2.6 WooCommerce 2.7 was expected but WooCommerce 3.0 came. Originally, the name was 2.7, but during the beta testing, the name changed from 2.7 to 3.0.

WooCommerce has decided to use Semantic Versioning for their major releases. Now the major releases will follow versions like 6.0, 7.0 and minor versions will follow 5.1, 5.2, 5.3 and on. The reason behind this is WooCommerce believes it describes the versions much better and gives the impact a version is going to have. So let us not waste time and get ready to indulge in great features! Check out best Woocommerce CRMs and how to add subcriptions to Woocommerce.

Improved Product Gallery: Performance up for Large Stores

Right from the 2.6 days, revamping the gallery was the talk of the town. In fact, even WooCommerce was not happy with the result. The major fallback was with mobile devices. After all the considerations and polling, finally, the latest update WooCommerce 3.0 is here.

The revamped gallery will appear on the individual pages where you get:

  • Shoppers get to use magnifying images and zooming ability from the lightbox popup.
  • Even if you have one image, the gallery’s performance is highly spontaneous. Now on clicking on a thumbnail, it updates the image viewed instead of opening in the lightbox popup window.
  • The touch gestures, mobile gallery views, swipe through the gallery, swiping up to close the current image and pinch-zoom are some of the gallery improvements.
  • Now even on any mobile device on zooming the image’s true size is viewable. In the previous version, it used to try scaling the image to fit a small window and honestly that was not a pleasant experience!
  • With these improvements, the website experience is definitely going to change the entire perspective of WooCommerce. For large online stores, this is a boom! Especially for those users who like buying online from their mobile devices.

WooCommerce latest version as expected comes with a bang. Continuing for the large store owners, they will get two certain improvements and they are:

  • In the new version, taxonomies are set to ascertain and portray the visibility of the product. This includes out of stock products and featured products as well. Bidding bye to the slow post meta, and
  • The queries of upsells are set to decrease and more focus is put on the cart and product pages.

The speed is always improving version by version!

CRUD Classes: Developer’s Benefits

Up until the latest WooCommerce update, developers had many possibilities to write data to their database for products and orders, including retrieving data. All this requires knowing exactly which data is to modify, As we all know this entire process was not pleasant and slightly difficult to understand as well.

Therefore, the  WooCommerce latest version comes with single writing and data retrieving option, known as the CRUD classes. CRUD or Create, Read, Update, Delete. The CRUD classes in the WooCommerce 3.0 version not only help in modifying orders but for customers, line items, products, payment tokens, shipping zones, and coupons with much lesser coding than before.

The benefits that developers are getting:

  • Each data is defined for its resource and the validation and flow are controlled.
  • No need to keep track of the type or any internal details, instead just knowing the name of your data is enough.
  • You can easily move data including custom tables without changing the present coding.
  • You get less coding work and more testing, great for developers.

Data Management with CLI

The Command Line Interface (CLI) is totally revamped. In the older version, the CLI gets powered by a separate code from the REST API. Meaning, the code could be accidentally duplicated around the database and certain things were possible with CLI and not with REST API. The new CLI is REST API powered, requiring very little coding and provides you ample power to retain the current command.

Though it may not be possible to highlight all the features of WooCommerce 3.0 in a single post still as much as possible has been stated here. Some other vital improvements are:

  • The customers can dismiss the site-wide notice.
  • Erasing the error that 2.6 users faced. WooCommerce latest version 3.0 now comes with WordPress networks/multisite user handling in the new release. Therefore the existing users who have the same network account are easy to add to the current store.
  • Now the product per cent coupon and cart per cent merge in one method, eliminating all the previous confusion which was due to cart-based validation.
  • The logging process is better, a bliss for developers.
wp wc customer
wp wc customer_download
wp wc order_note
wp wc payment_gateway
wp wc product
wp wc product_attribute
wp wc product_attribute_term
wp wc product_cat
wp wc product_review
wp wc product_shipping_class
wp wc product_tag
wp wc product_variation
wp wc shipping method
wp wc shipping_zone
wp wc shipping_zone_location
wp wc shipping_zone_method
wp wc shop_coupon
wp wc shop_order
wp wc shop_order_refund
wp wc tax
wp wc tax_class
wp wc tool
wp wc webhook
wp wc webhook_delivery

Bonus Features

Template changes: With such a big update, a mega change is inevitable. WooCommerce 3.0 comes with mega template changes. This is the list of the updated templates:

  • cart/cart.php
  • cart/cross-sells.php
  • checkout/thankyou.php
  • emails/email-order-items.php
  • emails/plain/email-order-items.php
  • myaccount/downloads.php
  • order/order-details-customer.php
  • order/order-details-item.php
  • order/order-details.php
  • single-product/add-to-cart/grouped.php
  • single-product/add-to-cart/simple.php
  • single-product/add-to-cart/variation-add-to-cart-button.php
  • single-product/meta.php
  • single-product/photoswipe.php
  • single-product/price.php
  • single-product/product-attributes.php
  • single-product/product-image.php
  • single-product/product-thumbnails.php
  • single-product/related.php
  • single-product/review-meta.php
  • single-product/review-rating.php
  • single-product/stock.php
  • single-product/tabs/additional-information.php

To point out, WooCommerce has much more going on than just this. Here are few more changes in the WordPress 3.0 release that we simply cannot miss out on. So, here is what you need to know.

  • The tax rates are automatically sorted. As a result, it allows managing the new tax zones easily.
  • The customers can now remove the sitewide notice.
  • Updating in the WordPress networks/multisite handling of the users. Therefore, WooCommerce allows adding the existing users to the current store. But the user must have an account in the same network.
  • Lastly, a better logging experience for the developer.

Final Thoughts – What up with the WooCommerce 3.0 Update Release?

So far, hope you like the new WooCommerce 3.0 as much as we had in letting you know about it! If you are ready to use the new version, do read the documentation on How to update and make sure, you have all your backups done and take your update from the Dashboard of WordPress.

In case, you run into any issue during updating or encounter a bug, follow these pointers:

  • If you have encountered a bug or a plugin that is giving you a problem, just report it to WooCommerce via their Github issue tracker.
  • Is the upgrade giving you issues? Go to the support page and submit a ticket for a solution.
  • Do you have a spontaneous idea for the next version or just want to talk about the present version, Please join the public discussion on WooCommerce forums on WordPress.org.

So, Enjoy WooCommerce 3.0! And don’t forget to share your experiences in the comment section below.