Storefront 2.3 beta 1

I’m happy to announce that Storefront 2.3 beta 1 is now available. You can download it and begin testing by clicking here.

What’s changed in 2.3?

Sticky Add-To-Cart & Product Pagination

Sticky Add-To-Cart

We reviewed the free extensions we have for Storefront and discovered that the Storefront Sticky Add-To-Cart and Storefront Product Pagination extensions were used by half of Storefront’s user base. Because of this, we’ve decided to integrate both these extensions directly into Storefront core.

Product Pagination

If you’re currently using any of these extensions, don’t panic; they won’t conflict. However, you should consider deleting the extensions once the final version of Storefront 2.3 is made available since they will no longer be supported or maintained separately.

New Customizer controls

It’s now possible to control the color of both the title and text of the “Hero” homepage section via the “Typography” section in the Customizer. Previously we tried to pick the appropriate color based on the background image, but the process often resulted in slow page loading times on the frontend.

Also with the addition of Sticky Add-To-Cart and Product Pagination, there’s now a new “Product Page” section with toggles to enable or disable these features in the Customizer.

Due to repeated reports of issues with certain browsers, we decided to refactor the CSS for the Header and Breadcrumb sections, removing the negative margins applied to the containers.

The following changes were made:

The ‘Primary Navigation’ was moved outside of the Header .col-full container.
The WooCommerce Breadcrumb was moved from the storefront_content_top hook to storefront_before_content.

Enhanced WooCommerce Brands integration

The WooCommerce Brands integration allows you to create, assign and list brands for products, and allow customers to view by brand. The enhanced integration includes:

Homepage section to display brands on your store.
Brand logo is now shown on the product pages, if the product has a brand.
New Brands archives design shows the logo and brand description.

Technical changes

Stylelint support

Helps you avoid errors and enforce consistent conventions in your stylesheets. Read more here.

Font Awesome 5 update

Font Awesome 5 has been re-written and re-designed completely from scratch. We took the opportunity to also update all our Sass files with the provided Sass variables instead of manually using the unicode values for better readability.

CSS/Sass file organization

The sass folder, where the CSS files were located, has been renamed to css. All .scss files will now be excluded from the final download file available in the WordPress.org repository.

Beta testing

If you’re using any Storefront extensions, plugins or child themes, we’ll start updating all our products to provide compatibility with 2.3 in the next few days. We recommend that you check for updates to these products and run the updates as they become available to ensure your site is ready for Storefront 2.3.

If you find issues we encourage you to open an issue on the Storefront GitHub repository with a clear description so we can resolve before the final release.

Gimme!

You can download Storefront 2.3 beta 1 right here.

Keep yourself in the loop!

6 responses to “Storefront 2.3 beta 1”

Glenn Martin

April 20, 2018

Just so I understand:

I’ve found 3 bugs already, but I’m using it with Homestore child-theme. Should I wait to report bugs until after Homestore is updated?

Reply
1. Tiago Noronha
  
  April 20, 2018
  
  Yes, all child themes will be updated to include compatibility with 2.3.
  
  Please wait for the update! 🙂
  
  Reply
  1. jdewit
    
    April 23, 2018
    
    Can you give a rough estimate when the updated child themes will be available? Will they also be in beta?
    
    Reply
    1. Tiago Noronha
      
      April 23, 2018
      
      Updates to all child themes will be available sometime this week. 🙂 There will be no beta period for the child themes.
      
      Reply
    2. Tiago Noronha
      
      April 27, 2018
      
      Just a quick update here; All child themes have been updated for compatibility, but they haven’t been release publicly yet.
      
      Expect updates to be available early week.
      
      Reply
Julian F. Christmas

May 3, 2018

First of all, I would like to say that I’m completely bias as I have been a senior Magento consultant for many years, but I love to keep up to date on other eCommerce platforms, especially all the new interesting features you guys are introducing to Woocommerce.

I’m very pleased to see the introduction of Stylelint support, as I have seen it be a major issue with many small-mid size Woocommerce installations that several developers, not working in a team, use long, cloddy and inconsistent stylesheets.

But the most exciting thing from my point of you is the sticky add-to-cart and product pagination feature. I was wondering about the usages pattern of sticky Add-To-Cart and Product Pagination feature, do you have any studies showing the effect on conversion rates using these features?

I would love to see a higher enthesis on per-store split-testing prior to implementing features like these across several thousand of different eCommerce sites, with very different customer segments.

Reply

Storefront 2.3 beta 1