We are thrilled to announce that WooCommerce 3.9 is officially available — it has been in development since November 2019, and contains around 600 commits from 18 contributors. This is a minor release, which means everything should be backward compatible with previous versions of WooCommerce.
Even though it’s a minor release, we always recommend checking that all your plugins and your theme are compatible before updating. For your peace of mind, you should also create backups of your site – read this guide for more details.
What’s new?
WooCommerce Blocks
WooCommerce 3.9 ships with WooCommerce Blocks 2.5.11, which includes a brand-new All Products block with filtering and pagination, among other improvements.
For more details, check out the WooCommerce Blocks release notes.
MaxMind Geolocation Integration
WooCommerce 2.3, which we released in February 2015, was the first version to integrate the MaxMind Geolocation database. We use the MaxMind GeoLite2 database behind the scenes to determine a customer’s country, a fact many store owners might not have been aware of.
MaxMind now requires all users to approve its end-user license agreement (EULA) in order to download the GeoLite2 database (learn more about this change on the MaxMind blog). As a result, we had to make some changes too — to keep this feature working in your store, you’ll now need a MaxMind license key. WooCommerce 3.9 includes MaxMind in the Integrations tab, where you can enter your key and learn more about this feature.
WordPress and PHP Minimum Requirements
In an effort to stay up to date and offer the best experience for store owners, we have raised the minimum WordPress and PHP version requirements.
Starting with WooCommerce 3.9, stores now need to use WordPress 5.0 and PHP 7.0 (or later versions). We have already added nudges to upgrade WordPress and PHP versions in WooCommerce 3.8, and will continue to evaluate the new minimum requirements with each release of WooCommerce.
Stores running earlier versions than PHP 7.0 and WordPress 5.0 will not be able to update to WooCommerce 3.9. If you’re interested in updating your software, we’ve put together a guide with step-by-step instructions for doing just that.
Additional Enhancements
- We’ve added a new Show button for password fields, similar to the one WordPress core introduced in version 5.3.
- This version introduces a Payment Gateway API to support pay buttons, which facilitates a better button setup and customization experience.
Like any release, this one, too, contains additional tweaks and and fixes, all of which you can find in the readme.txt.
How we tested WooCommerce 3.9
Starting with version 3.7, we’ve introduced a better testing process.
- We included more testers on an array of hosts, running popular extensions and themes.
- All our extensions and themes cleared internal testing.
- We ran managed upgrades on staging sites of real store owners to detect conflicts or bugs before the public release.
- We ate our own dog food, taking the release for a spin on woo.com.
Updating to WooCommerce 3.9
In addition to making a backup of your site, we recommend you test 3.9 on a staging site before upgrading your live site.
This version runs a minor database update, but only if you’ve enabled geolocation on your store before upgrading to 3.9.
Much 💜 to All Contributors
A hearty “thank you!” goes to everyone in the WooCommerce community, whether you contributed via bug reports, commits, spreading the word, or participating in community chats.
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| claudiosanches | peterfabian | ObliviousHarmony | rodrigoprimo | kloon |
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| vedanshujain | juliaamosova | R33D3M33R | justinshreve | jbutkus |
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| Luminus | denho | om4james | itzmekhokan | BrandynL |
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| dechov | dsmithweb | senadir | JPry | garretthyder |
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| mensmaximus | khokan-cn | maximejobin | JuanchoPestana | superdav42 |
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