WooCommerce Community News: April 2021

Howdy, Woo Developer Community! 👋 Here are some updates of recent happenings that you may have missed over the past month. Some items are detailed in previous posts on this blog, and other items are pulled from sources like GitHub. We’ve packaged everything into a digest to help keep everyone in the loop.


Developer Resources

  • We’re continuing to revise and refine some of our developer guidance around building React-powered interfaces with components. We made recent updates that feature function-based components and React hooks, which are quickly becoming the standard across the WordPress ecosystem.
  • Be on the lookout for updated guidance around all things related to testing in WooCommerce, including concepts and tooling, as well as best practices for writing and running tests.
  • The teams who maintain WooCommerce have released several recent updates to some of the underlying Node packages that power the Woo ecosystem. If you’re a developer who relies on any of these resources, take a look at some of the updates that have recently been published to NPM:
    • New Packages
      • Customer Effort Score – Initial release of a package to help measure customer satisfaction.
      • Experimental – Initial release of a package intended to help fortify import statements as components transition from experimental to non-experimental.
      • ExPlat – Initial release of a package to help facilitate A/B testing in WooCommerce. You can read more about ExPlat, Automattic’s new experimentation platform, in this recent blog post.
    • Updates
      • API v0.1.2 added support for new product types and coupons.
      • Components v6.0 and v6.1 collectively include enhancements to search components as well as improvements to pagination buttons and other styling.
      • Currency v3.1.0 was published April 12 and includes improvements that localize regional currency for merchant onboarding, as well as a fix that protects against errors if a country code is not available in the locale information.
      • Data v1.2.0 was published April 12 and includes many improvements, such as support for persisted queries in the navigation data store, as well as the addition of a useUser hook.
      • Date v3.0 was published April 12 and includes an enhancement that takes leap year into account when calculating previous periods for comparisons.
      • Dependency Extraction Webpack Plugin v1.5.0 shipped April 16 and added support for the ExPlat and Experimental packages listed above.
      • End-to-End Testing Environment v0.2.1 added support for screenshots during test failures and reporting of errors to Slackbot.
      • End-to-End Core Tests has multiple recent releases that include the addition of over 20 new test flows.
      • Navigation v6.0 was published April 12 and introduced support for adding listeners that respond to history changes along with persisted query management and a new parameter for overriding default pages in WooCommerce Admin.
      • Number v2.1.1 was published April 12 and introduced TypeScript support.

WooCommerce Core

WooCommerce Admin

WooCommerce Blocks


We want to hear from you

If you’re reading this, drop us a line in the comments below to let us know how you’re liking this community news format. We want to make sure we’re sharing information and engaging with the community in an impactful and efficient way. And as always, feel free to ask us questions in the comments below or in the #developers channel of the WooCommerce Community Slack.

2 responses to “WooCommerce Community News: April 2021”

  1. I’ve been wondering what will happen when the checkout, the catalogue, and the single product pages in WooCommerce core are Blocks. Will it be ‘flip the switch’ and it will just work? What about the snippet on my site that removes City from cart shipping calculator in cart, for example? What about the features that are dictated by the theme I use (GeneratePress)?

    I use the Hand-picked products Block, so I have an inkling of how things will be.

    But I am not a developer. If I was a client, I could turn to the developer. But I built my own store.

    It would be very helpful if you would maintain a road map addressed at our level – to those like me who do not understand React etc. and wonder what the future holds.

    I am sorry if I haven’t expressed this very well.

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