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WooCommerce Core WooCommerce Core Release Notes

WooCommerce 4.0 is coming!

We are excited to announce that WooCommerce 4.0 will be the second release of 2020 and is currently scheduled for early March.

This is going to be a major release, which means that there will be some breaking changes. However, the amount of breaking changes is much smaller than for WooCommerce 3.0.

WooCommerce Admin

The main feature coming into WooCommerce 4.0 is the inclusion of the new WooCommerce Admin interface. This is the first step on our journey to a modern, JavaScript-driven commerce experience for merchants and includes

  1. New dashboard
  2. New and improved reports
  3. Improved notification experience
  4. New store management tools

This change, enabled by the transition of WordPress ecosystem towards more powerful, React-driven experience, means that WooCommerce core can leverage the latest technology to build attractive and useful reports and improve everyday workflows for store owners. As a plugin, this functionality has been released over a year ago and it’s currently installed on more than 900,000 sites, so we believe it’s ready for the prime time in the WooCommerce core.

We plan to release the beta version early in February and the final 4.0 version in early March.

  • Customer management
  • Powerful analytics
  • Activity panel

Please note that for WooCommerce Admin to work, you would need to run WordPress 5.3. In case you use older WordPress version, the new Admin experience will be disabled automatically.

Breaking changes

As mentioned earlier, the release will contain only a small number of breaking changes. The main one is going to be the upgrade of Action Scheduler library to Action Scheduler 3.0. This release brings new database structure and custom tables for scheduled actions but remains compatible with the previous releases on the level of PHP code. This should considerably reduce the load on the standard WordPress database tables while enabling advanced analytics to run even on large stores.

Please follow our blog to receive further updates!

18 replies on “WooCommerce 4.0 is coming!”

so don’t update to 4.0 for a few years after the release since it will break everything like 3.0

On Fri, Jan 31, 2020 at 9:44 AM Develop WooCommerce wrote:

> Peter Fabian posted: ” We are excited to announce that WooCommerce 4.0 > will be the second release of 2020 and is currently scheduled for early > March. This is going to be a major release, which means that there will be > some breaking changes. However, the amount of break” >

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Hi Space News!

I’m sorry you experienced the breakage of your site when upgrading to WooCommerce 3.0. We’re working hard to prevent these kinds of problems going forward and 4.0 is a breaking change in only a handful of special cases. Of course, we recommend to first try it out on a pre-production or testing environment before upgrading your live store.

In case you’re worried about upgrading your site, you can sign up for our Artisanal upgrade programme, where our Happiness Engineers can test things out and upgrade the site for you: https://woocommerce.survey.fm/woocommerce-4-0-beta-testing-registration

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By Post Author

Great job, this is exciting !
The load reduce will be impact all pages of all website who use WooCommerce ?

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Hi Benoit,

The database load reduction is connected with the analytics side of the new WooCommerce Admin functionality, i.e. when you use the new reports, it should provide a better experience than what you experienced before with WooCommerce Admin plugin. Let us know if you have more questions!

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By Post Author

The Admin Dashboard is a nice playground but is it really needed? For small stores it is a pain waiting on it, before data is loaded. I gave the plugin a try this days and I do not see any advantage over reports.

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the release will contain only a small number of breaking changes. The main one is going to be the upgrade of Action Scheduler library to Action Scheduler 3.0.

It’s also worth mentioning that Action Scheduler 3.0 was included in WooCommerce Subscriptions version 3.0 in January. As a result, that version of Action Scheduler is currently active on over 10,000 sites.

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Hey guys,

Since this is a breaking release and you’re planning to release this in 3 weeks time… could you guys let the community know a solid timeframe?

3 week turn around on a MAJOR is pretty unrealistic if we need to test (I’m a 3rd party extension developer)

Thanks in advance

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Hi,

for the timeline, please check out the latest beta post (https://woocommerce.wordpress.com/2020/02/10/woocommerce-4-0-beta-1/). As mentioned in this post, most of the changes are additions, so we are hoping it would not cause problems for 3rd party extensions.

Nevertheless, we’ll be running a compatibility check and will reach out to all the extension authors that we’ll identify as potentially facing problems. Please reach out to us soon if you encounter issues.

Thanks!

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By Post Author

Hi, Will this fix the issue with filtering on product variables, i.e. if I filter on size, will it hide the out of stock sizes?

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Would be great if you can include product filters that check for VARIATIONS that are out-of-stock. A simple requirement but very important for so many stores, currently made way too difficult. Issue 25524

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HI guy, when I updated woocommerce, I am getting this error from one (for us important) plugin, which is probably abonded, so no more updates.. error is this:
Declaration of WC_SA_Email::get_from_address() should be compatible with WC_Email::get_from_address($from_email = ”)
Declaration of WC_SA_Email::get_from_name() should be compatible with WC_Email::get_from_name($from_name = ”)

and on that line, written in error is:
class WC_SA_Email extends WC_Email

I guess there is some names what changes only in wc4

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