WooCommerce 3.6 has arrived!

Today we are excited to announce the availability of WooCommerce 3.6. The latest release of WooCommerce has been in development since November 2018, and during that time, 3.6 has had 2279 commits from 122 contributors.

3.6 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 —please see this guide for more details.

Product Blocks

For store operators and builders, one of the biggest additions in WooCommerce 3.6 is the introduction of our new Product Blocks for the WordPress block editor.

For all sites running WordPress 5.0 or higher, you will have access to build rich landing pages using the following blocks now available in WooCommerce 3.6:

  • Products by Category
  • Best Selling Products
  • Hand-picked Products
  • Newest Products
  • On Sale Products
  • Top-Rated Products
  • Products by Attribute
  • Featured Product

To learn more about what you can do with the new Product Blocks, and how developers can customize them, check out this post.

Performance Improvements

Customers and Store Owners will experience a noticeably faster experience due to extensive performance enhancements that improve both admin and frontend page load times. For full details around the performance enhancements that are available in 3.6, please be sure to read our developer post which takes a deep dive into the technical side of things.

A few quick highlights of the improvements on the front-end for sites running WooCommerce 3.6 are:

  • A 62% improvement in the load time when ordering and filtering products
  • Reduced overall load time by bypassing inactive webhooks
  • Reduced the load time for pages with category or product attribute lists
  • Reduced load time of product pages with attributes

Additional Updates

In addition to the new Product Blocks and Performance Improvements, you will find the following enhancements in WooCommerce 3.6:

  • The ability to increase/decrease stock options via the bulk edit form.
  • Accessibility improvements on the shop order-by selector.
  • When adding/editing/deleting items manually from orders, the corresponding product stock will be updated to reflect the event, and an order note will also log the action.
  • Added suggestions for official extensions.
  • Store attribute values as post_excerpt for variations to support easier searching for variations.
  • Customer notes containing URLs now automatically converts to clickable links.
  • Allow states in zones to be searched by country name.
  • Added registration success notices to account pages.

Beyond these enhancements, the release also contains some tweaks, new hooks and various fixes – all of which you can find out about in the readme.

Upgrading to 3.6

3.6 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 missed the beta and release candidate (RC), the following information may be useful:

Deprecated in 3.6

  • wc_get_min_max_price_meta_query – removed in favour of lookup tables which remove the need to filter via post meta.
  • Term meta helper functions – deprecated in favour of WP core term meta functions such as https://developer.wordpress.org/reference/functions/get_term_meta/. These have not been needed since WP 4.4.
  • WC_Country::load_country_states – States are now loaded on the fly as needed.
  • WC_Cache_Helper::delete_version_transients – Transients are now versioned within the value negating the need for cleanup.
  • WC_Background_Updater – We’ve switched updates to the ActionScheduler queue.
  • Simplify Commerce – This gateway has been deprecated for several years and hidden in the UI. The code has now been removed.

Template File Changes in 3.6

FileChanges
content-product.phpPassing $product to wc_product_class() to avoid re-read of product
content-single-product.phpPassing $product to wc_product_class() to avoid re-read of product
single-product-reviews.phpSupport for wc_review_ratings_enabled()
cart/cart-shipping.phpVerbiage changes
checkout/form-billing.phpUpdate _e usage to esc_html_e
checkout/form-shipping.phpUpdate _e usage to esc_html_e
emails/admin-cancelled-order.phpCopy reworded, double escape fix
emails/customer-note.php Made note clickable
global/form-login.phpUpdated order of remember me and submit buttons.
global/quantity-input.phpw3C validation fixes
loop/orderby.phpAdded aria label.
loop/rating.phpStar rating bug fix.
myaccount/form-edit-address.phpAdded names to nonces, setting country value bug fix
myaccount/form-login.phpAdded actions woocommerce_before_lost_password_form and woocommerce_after_lost_password_form
order/form-tracking.phpPHPCS
single-product/product-attributes.phpAdded filter woocommerce_display_product_attributes to give full control of output
single-product/rating.phpwc_review_ratings_enabled() support
single-product/review-rating.phpwc_review_ratings_enabled() support

How 3.6 was tested

3.6 beta was released on March 15th 2019 and remained in beta until the RC on March 28th 2019. 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.
  • Tested and updated woo.com itself to be running 3.6.

Much 💜 to all the contributors

Finally a big thanks to everyone in the community who has contributed via issue reports, fixestranslation, testing, supporting other users or simply spreading the word.

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mikejolley kloon haszari rodrigoprimo rrennick claudiulodro
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16 responses to “WooCommerce 3.6 has arrived!”

  1. I just did this update and my website crashed, it is giving 502 error, now waiting my hosting serveice to restore the backup.

    1. 502 Bad Gateway is a generic error, there’s something in the error logs?

    2. Woocommerce 3.6.0 is causing Segmentation Faults upon login for users on WP Engine.

      1. Jay Hill could you provide any more details? Error logs perhaps?

    3. Are you using WPEngine? Looks like there’s an issue that we are working on it already: https://github.com/woocommerce/woocommerce/issues/23352

      1. Is it possible WPEngine to make conflict with Woo? I have 502 in one of my sites, I have must see error logs

        1. Sorry for the delay, this has been fixed in 3.6.1. Thanks!

  2. louperrot25 Avatar
    louperrot25

    Bonjour, je viens de faire cette mise à jour et au même moment mes fiches produits se sont complètement cassées. C’est-à-dire que la galerie d’images se positionne avec les visuels l’un en dessous de l’autre, l’ajout au panier est en bas de page tout comme la description.. Enfin, tout est mis n’importe comment.. Avez-vous une idée du problème que je rencontre ?

    1. I tried to translate to English, not sure if makes sense:

      Hello, I just made this update and at the same time my product sheets have completely broken. That is to say that the image gallery is positioned with the visuals one below the other, the addition to the basket is at the bottom of the page as the description .. Finally, everything is put n does not matter how .. Do you have any idea of the problem I’m having?

      By what you are describing sounds like cache that need to be purged or your theme requires an update.

  3. Hi
    First thank you for the update and effort you making improvement to keep woocommerce number 1.

    I did the update however my alidropship chrome extension extension stopped working … the prices in my store was changed randomly the way that photos of the product are not shown in the same way as before … I think that my theme provider and Alidropship provider need to follow you update to keep compatibility. in meantime I will downgrading woocommerce to keep my store working.

    Thank you again

  4. yuriyglushkov Avatar
    yuriyglushkov

    Bug: “?orders” url parameter make 404

    1. I tried to reproduce, but not able to.
      Please report on GitHub if this is still an issue for you:
      https://github.com/woocommerce/woocommerce/issues/new?template=Bug_report.md
      Thanks!

  5. Craig Simpson Avatar
    Craig Simpson

    Is the product blocks plugin still needed?

    1. All blocks has been merged into 3.6, but we are going to use that plugin to develop new features and blocks, so you still may use and test new blocks before come to WooCommerce.

  6. Woww great news!

    Thanks for sharing!

  7. woocommerce-3-6 very useful, Best economic Woocommerce platform.

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