Getting WooCommerce 2.1 ready for beta 1

With only a couple open issues left in our GitHub repository, we’re closing in on the first beta release. It’s time to start reviewing the issues and have a closer look at what still needs to be done.

Patches, feedback and testing is very welcome in all these issues. It will take a bit of a team effort to get everything done in time. We still have the end of this month as a target for the first beta of WooCommerce 2.1, so every bit of help is welcome these coming weeks.

Home stretch for new features

Besides the smaller issues mentioned above, there are a couple bigger issues still left on the tracker. Our main new features are close to being completed, but all still need some work. They also all need testing, so we can squash the obvious issues before we go into the beta phase.

  • #4043 WooCommerce 2.1 welcome screen – As soon as everything is done, we need to put a new Welcome Screen together where our users get a quick overview of what has changed and what actions they possibly need to take to get everything back as it was before the update (example: #3169 Remove default integrations). Ideas for this are welcome.
  • #4054 New “Add Payment Method” Feature – This issue is being lead by Brent Shepherd who has developed a way payment gateways can offer the option to customers to add new credit cards to their accounts. Obviously, this still requires some more testing before we merge it into the v2.1 branch, but it looks very much completed already.
  • #4055 REST API Implementation – One of the biggest chunks of new code that will go in WooCommerce 2.1. Max Rice has been leading this issue and has already set up the largest part of a full REST API. There is a list of todos in the ticket and a feature as large as this one needs massive testing before we can release it. We’re going to base it on the WP-API project, that will hopefully go into WordPress core in a release soon after WordPress 3.8. By doing this, we make sure that our API code is very close to the WordPress core implementation already, so we can make it 100% compatible as soon as that’s available.

Fixes and other minor issues

There are a couple minor issues for fixes and enhancements still left, that we feel they need including in v2.1, because there is no pretty way of patching these in the v2.0.x branch:

  • #3513 Issues with Varnish – We’ve spend a lot of time on making sure that WooCommerce is fully compatible with Varnish out of the box. We’ve been getting great feedback from a couple larger hosts in the WordPress ecosystem already, but still need some more testing to make sure this issue is resolved.
  • #3862 Sort out decimals + locales – @mikejolley is putting in great efforts to make the input of decimal values make more sense to end users, by utilising the locale of the user.
  • #3926 Meta formatting – This is a minor visual enhancement that is just going to make things look a little bit better in the backend when it comes to the display of the meta information.
  • #4032 get_price_html of variable products is wrong when variations override parent tax_class – A bug in the overriding of the tax class for variations, recently reported. Needs investigating.
  • #4034 Shipping Calculator “Success” Message” – This is a work in progress enhancement that will change the default colours of notices, powered by a new Notices API that is made by Brent. This might need a little extra integration with the existing messages that we already have, including extensive testing.
  • #4042 Confirm MP6 compatibility – Now that it’s confirmed that MP6 is going to be the new administration panel theme, we need to make sure that our wp-admin screens still look good. @jameskoster will lead this issue, but any help and patches are welcome here.
  • #4044 New Add-ons Page Layout Issues – A minor display bug in our new Add-Ons page on wider screens. Should be a fairly easy fix, still needs to be done though.

I’d like to get these issues closed as soon as possible as they might look minor at first, but they can greatly delay our beta 1 release. Any feedback and testing on these issues is greatly welcome.


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