WooCommerce 3.5 is here!

Today we’re excited to release WooCommerce 3.5 into the wild! 3.5 has been in development since May, and has had over 1512 commits from 98 contributors.

3.5 is a “minor” release; this version should be backwards compatible with sites running versions of WooCommerce greater than or equal to 3.0. We do of course recommend ensuring your extensions and themes are compatible before upgrading, and making backups for peace of mind–see this handy guide for more details.

REST API v3

This release introduces the latest version of the WooCommerce REST API. This API has some new endpoints as well as features added to existing endpoints. Among these are:

  • A reviews endpoint to list, get, create, and update product reviews.
  • Date fields are now editable on the products endpoint, and the endpoint has been updated to work with the “on backorder” stock status introduced in WC 3.3.
  • A series of new reports endpoints to get total counts of orders, products, customers, coupons and reviews.
  • Automatic total calculations when applying/removing coupons in the orders endpoint.
  • New data endpoints to fetch Continents, Countries and Currencies.
  • Refund line items through the API.
  • Query sort products by price, popularity and rating.
  • Query products and variations by stock_status.
  • Ability to batch update settings.

For a complete list of the API endpoints and their features check out the API documentation.

Note: REST API v2 and other legacy API versions are still included in WooCommerce 3.5 for backwards compatibility.

Improved copy for transactional emails

We have updated the default wording of the WooCommerce transactional e-mails to make them friendlier and less robotic. The emails have had the same wording for years, so an update to the wording was due. Having better default content for the transactional e-mails reduces the need for custom e-mail templates and overrides, and it will improve the customer experience.

This is the first phase of a larger initiative to improve WooCommerce’s emails and email content editing experience. Stay tuned in 2019 for more improvements.

Features for store owners

Features for store owners

Here’s some other new features you may find useful while using WooCommerce:

  • You can now export products by category in the CSV exporter.
  • You can now set a low-stock threshold for individual products.
  • The payment method settings page has improved accessibility.

Features for store builders and developers

Features for store builders and developers

If you’re building stores for clients, or just developing on top of WooCommerce, here’s some new toys at your disposal:

  • The Action Scheduler library used by the WooCommerce Subscriptions plugin and other WooCommerce plugins is now included in WooCommerce core. It provides a robust, scalable background processing solution for developers. In 3.5 webhooks are delivered using this library.
  • Support for the Custom Product Tables feature plugin. We’re working on custom database tables to store product data and improve the performance and scalability of WooCommerce. This release adds the hooks and filters required by the feature plugin. Read more about this here.
  • Support for the wc-admin feature plugin. We’re working on a modernization of the WooCommerce admin experience. This release adds the API endpoints required by the feature plugin. Read more about this here.
  • Many new filters and actions to increase the customizability of WooCommerce.

On top of the new features, there are a variety of minor tweaks, new hooks, performance improvements, and fixes in this minor release. We won’t go into detail here, but you can see the full list of changes in the readme if you’re interested!

Upgrading to 3.5

3.5 is a minor update and should be compatible with sites running any version of WooCommerce greater than or equal to 3.0. We still recommend testing and backing up prior to upgrading just to be safe.

Note: There are a few post-update database upgrade routines that need to run after updating. These may run for a while if you have a large amount of data in your database. On very large databases we recommend running the upgrade routine with the WP CLI command wp wc update instead of through the admin interface.

If you’re a developer and have somehow missed the beta and RC, the following information may be useful.

Deprecations in 3.5

  • WC_Form_Handler::order_again has been deprecated. The order again handling has been refactored and it is no longer neccessary to directly call the method.

Template file changes in 3.5

- All of the email templates have been updated with new wordings.
- cart/cart-shipping.php – Improved shipping calculator experience.
- cart/mini-cart.php – Removed unnecessary nbsp;s from template.
- cart/shipping-calculator.php – Improved shipping calculator experience.
- myaccount/form-edit-account.php – Add form tag hook.
- myaccount/form-login.php – Add form tag hook.
- notices/error.php – Run notices through new wc_kses_notice function.
- notices/notice.php – Run notices through new wc_kses_notice function.
- notices/success.php – Run notices through new wc_kses_notice function.
- order/order-again.php – Refactored order again handling.
- content-widget-product.php – Add extra check to prevent fatal errors when global $product is not a product.
- single-product-reviews.php – Removed unnecessary aria-required attributes.

How we tested 3.5

3.5 beta was released on September 12th 2018 and remained in beta until the RC on September 28th 2018. During this time we tested internally, tested our own extensions and themes, tested popular premium themes, did some managed updates for actual customers on staging sites to pick up on any conflicts or bugs before the public release, and tested the update on woo.com.

If you spot any issues please let us know on GitHub. Thanks to everyone who helped test 3.5!

We ❤ Contributors

A massive thanks to everyone in the community who have contributed, be that via issue reports, fixestranslation, testing, supporting other users or simply spreading the word.

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18 responses to “WooCommerce 3.5 is here!”

  1. Thank you! That’s a really well laid out update post, which makes it easy to understand what’s going on & passing the info on to my clients. Especially good that you’ve highlighted changes to default emails, shop owners do get rather attached to these things.

  2. thymeandhoneybakery Avatar
    thymeandhoneybakery

    Updated this morning – server CPU usage went through the roof and I had to disable woocommerce to fix it. Something’s broken…

    1. If you have info that could help us reproduce the issue please open an issue at https://github.com/woocommerce/woocommerce/issues

  3. jeffkerby Avatar

    Receiving fatal error messages and the upgrade fails. I have had to restore 3 times now, so will wait for a stable version before attempting the upgrade again.

    1. What are the errors you are getting?

      1. jeffkerby Avatar

        Let me run again and then grab the error and restore from back up to get my site back up and running.

        1. jeffkerby Avatar

          There is a new version of WooCommerce available. View version 3.5.0 details or update now.
          Heads up! The versions of the following plugins you’re running haven’t been tested with the latest version of WooCommerce (3.5).
          Plugin Tested up to WooCommerce version
          WooCommerce PayPal Checkout Gateway 3.4
          WooCommerce Product CSV Import Suite 3.4

          Deactivated and Deleted Plugins

          WooCommerce
          Settings | Deactivate
          An eCommerce toolkit that helps you sell anything. Beautifully.
          Version 3.4.7 | By Automattic | View details | Docs | API docs | Premium support

          There is a new version of WooCommerce available. View version 3.5.0 details or update now.

          WooCommerce
          Settings | Deactivate
          An eCommerce toolkit that helps you sell anything. Beautifully.
          Version 3.4.7 | By Automattic | View details | Docs | API docs | Premium support

          Update Failed: 500 Internal Server Error Internal Server Error The server encountered an internal error or misconfiguration and was unable to complete your request. Please contact the server administrator and inform them of the time the error occurred, and the actions you performed just before this error. More information about this error may be available in the server error log.

  4. If I update to 3.5 – are all my emails with new text and wordings? is it possible to see the new mails before upgrading? I am little bit confused.

  5. hunters'best Avatar
    hunters’best

    Has anyone controlled the order emails before publicizing the new version?

    There are random strings at the end of each email like in the New Order Email.

    It could make sense if you had another language than English, because one can translate these strings into whatever content you need. But in English you are stuck with these developer’s funny leftovers.

    1. Hi,

      Please see this GitHub issue: https://github.com/woocommerce/woocommerce/issues/21698. It was added on purpose but is not popular. The string will be removed in WC 3.5.1 releasing tomorrow.

  6. hunters'best Avatar
    hunters’best

    php esc_html_e( ‘Over to you.’, ‘woocommerce’ ); is one of these strings I mentioned above

  7. Hi Guys, when we update to Woocommerce 3.5 the site show a strange error. When a visitor opens the cart page with a product in cart, the site always shows the messages that the product is out of stock.

    For now I have downgrade to Woocommerce version: 3.4.7.

    Regards,

    Mairjn Ruijl

  8. infostrii Avatar

    Hi!
    I have an issue with WooCommerce 3.5.0 (also with 3.5.1)
    I upgraded from 3.4.7 to the newest version, and the site turned turned super slow instantly.
    Very slow to open, or go from page to page (504 errors some times also).
    I tried a lot of things, deactivated all my plugins keeping only Woocommerce. But still.
    Even the theme is up to date.
    I finally managed to downgrade to 3.4.7, so it went to normal.

    Any idea what is the problem? How I could update the site without having this issue?
    Thank you in advance!

    1. We haven’t had a report of this for 3.5.1 yet, so it may be a conflict with some other plugin(s) you are running. One way you can debug it is to use the Query Monitor plugin and see if there is anything obvious that it picks up.

      1. infostrii Avatar

        Hi thank you for your comment.
        Actually I found the solution here https://github.com/woocommerce/woocommerce/issues/21634

        On line 39 of class-wc-regenerate-images.php I changed the line to this

        // Resize WooCommerce images on the fly when browsing site through customizer as to showcase image setting changes in real time.
        if ( is_customize_preview() ) {
        add_filter( ‘wp_get_attachment_image_src’, array( __CLASS__, ‘maybe_resize_image’ ), 10, 4);
        }

        And then everything worked again!

  9. Hi, is it possible to downgrade from 3.5.2 to 3.4.7 without problems? I’m particularly worried about any modification in the database tables that has been done during the update…

    We have to downgrade because we just found out after updating last night, that the manual reduce/increase of products stock in the admin has been removed (why???), and we use it a lot…
    Thanks in advance

    1. It’s possible but not really recommended as you’ll lose access to other fixes/security patches.

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