WC 2.6 codename “Zipping Zebra” has been tagged and is ready for testing. This is our 2nd major release of 2016 and has around 900 commits in total. You can download beta 1 here.
Release Highlights
2.6.0 has a host of improvements and new features to dramatically improve shipping. Shipping Zones are now part of core. This means you’ll now be able to have instance based shipping methods, multiple flat rates, and much much more without the use of extensions. For developers, the shipping API docs are inside our wiki.
The My Account shortcode/pages have been restructured to be tab based. This keeps things organised and allows devs to add more tabs if needed.
You can read more about the tabbed my account page here.
The cart page operations now use AJAX (updating item quantities, removing cart items, applying coupons, and updating shipping options) which you can read about and see in action here.
We’ve worked on our layered nav system in 2.6 adding new functionality (now you can filter products by ratings) and improving performance for all layered nav queries.
Developers will have access to our new Payment Tokens API which standardized the way in which tokens are stored and displayed. This wiki article explains usage for devs.
We’ve also released a new version of the WooCommerce REST API, based on the WordPress REST API, which you can read about here.
Other features developers and users will be interested in:
- We’ve moved custom term meta implementation to WP Term Meta which was introduced in 4.4.
- Added new wc_get_orders() function to get order objects and ids instead of direct get_posts() calls.
- We’ve added the ability for shipping methods to store meta data to the order in the same way line items can.
- We’ve made wc_create_new_customer() pluggable.
- We’ve added > 100 new currencies based on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_circulating_currencies, and Bitcoin.
Template changes in 2.6.0
The following template files had their versions bumped in 2.6.0:
- single-product/review.php – Added hooks to support the following new templates:
- single-product/review-rating.php
- single-product/review-meta.php
- order/order-details.php – Fix to only get purchase note if product exists.
- myaccount/my-account.php – New action hooks to support tabbed navigation and the following new template files:
- myaccount/downloads.php
- myaccount/view-order.php
- myaccount/payment-methods.php
- myaccount/orders.php
- myaccount/navigation.php
- myaccount/my-downloads.php – Deprecated.
- myaccount/my-orders.php – Deprecated.
- myaccount/form-add-payment-method.php – Added tabbed naviation.
- myaccount/form-edit-address.php – Added tabbed naviation.
- myaccount/form-edit-account.php – Added tabbed naviation.
Release Schedule and beta testing
Beta 1 is out today (April 22nd). Subsequent betas will be released as needed and we’ll post on this blog if this happens.
If all goes to plan, Release Candidate 1 will be tagged during May 2016.
If you’d like to help test, you should download the release from Github. We posted a nice little write-up on beta testing here which should get you started. Please read that and jump right in!
If you’re like to help translate 2.6, you’ll find it on the development branch on translate.wordpress.org.
Thanks to all of our testers and contributors.
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