WooCommerce 4.5 is now available!

We are excited to announce that WooCommerce 4.5 is now publicly available! It has been in development since August 2020 and the core has been updated with about 643 commits from 25 contributors.

This is a minor release, which means everything is backward compatible with the previous version.

This release is relatively small compared to recent WooCommerce releases, and is being released with a focus on stability and compatibility. We are currently improving our testing processes based on learnings from recent releases, 4.4 in particular. These changes will allow us to return to our normal release size, and ensure that we are providing a reliable, stable product with each release.

As always, we recommend 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 4.5?

The WooCommerce 4.5 release contains primarily fixes and improvements.

New onboarding guide

welcome-modal

When you first visit your WooCommerce home screen, you’ll now see a guided tour that provides more information about the home screen. (#4890)

REST API

This release merges the REST API (#27100), which was previously a separate repository, back into WooCommerce Core. Any issues with the REST API should now be logged to the Core WooCommerce repository.

Filters

We have added new filters:

FiltersDescription
woocommerce_cart_product_cannot_add_another_messageFilters message about more than 1 product being added to cart.
woocommerce_cart_product_out_of_stock_messageFilters message about a product being out of stock.
woocommerce_cart_product_not_enough_stock_messageFilters message about a product not having enough stock.
woocommerce_file_download_methodFilter download method.
woocommerce_query_for_reserved_stockAllows filtering of the query for getting reserved stock of a product.

Notable fixes and improvements

There are many fixes and stability improvements in this release, including

  1. When you have “hide shipping costs until an address is entered”, the shipping cost is now hidden until the complete address is entered. This fixes an issue where previously shipping costs were displayed prior to the complete address being entered. (#27143)
  2. If you cancel a pending order, coupon holds for that order are now released. This fixes an issue where cancelling a PayPal checkout caused the coupons that were in the cart to become invalid because they were used in a previous canceled order. (#27179)
  3. When manually creating orders, searches for variations will now fallback to the parent SKU if a child SKU is not specified. (#27171)
  4. Coupon codes are now always stored with HTML entities encoded. This increases security by ensuring that we don’t store unfiltered input. There is a database migration in place when 4.5 is installed, so this is a non-breaking change. (#27140)

You can find the complete changelog for this release on the changelog.txt file.

We’ve also made some changes to address issues with the filter by attribute widget when used with variable products in this release, but we recognize that it still may not work as expected. We’re tracking the issues with the widget in #27419 and welcome you follow along there as we work toward fixing this in the next release.

Database changes

This release does not require any core database alteration. However, the 4.3 release 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 update coupon codes such that HTML entities are properly encoded. This will be done in batches and 10 and is backward compatible.

Minimum WordPress Requirement

While this release does not change the minimum PHP version, it does increase the minimum WordPress version to 5.3. Remember that you can read all about the new WordPress support policy in the developer blog post detailing it.

Much 💜 to all the contributors

Finally a big thanks to everyone in the community who has contributed via issue reports, fixestranslation, testing, supporting other users or simply spreading the word.

WooCommerce core

jonathansadowski claudiosanches Konamiman rrennick kloon ObliviousHarmony
jonathansadowski claudiosanches Konamiman rrennick kloon ObliviousHarmony
vedanshujain Aljullu peterfabian juliaamosova tammullen haydenw
vedanshujain Aljullu peterfabian juliaamosova tammullen haydenw
Rahmon jgreys georgejipa timmyc thenbrent danielmorell
Rahmon jgreys georgejipa timmyc thenbrent danielmorell
IanDelMar
IanDelMar

WooCommerce Admin

jeffstieler samueljseay becdetat joshuatf timmyc psealock
jeffstieler samueljseay becdetat joshuatf timmyc psealock
jconroy octaedro c-shultz danielbitzer
jconroy octaedro c-shultz danielbitzer

WooCommerce Blocks

nerrad Aljullu senadir haszari github-actions[bot]
nerrad Aljullu senadir haszari github-actions[bot]

One response to “WooCommerce 4.5 is now available!”

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