Hello everyone,

With WooCommerce 4.0 now comfortably behind us, it’s time to begin our next release cycle.

As of today, WooCommerce 4.1 is available for beta testing. You can either download it directly from WordPress.org or install our WooCommerce Beta Tester Plugin.

What’s new in 4.1?

The primary focus of this minor release is stability and performance. If you’d like to dig into the details, take a moment to review the changelog for a more granular breakdown of everything included. In addition, keep an eye out for another blog post soon containing developers notes for this release.

Here’s a broad overview of what’s new.

New Setup Wizard

With this release we’ve finished our roll-out of the new setup wizard. All new shops will be directed through this new setup flow, so if you haven’t checked it out yet, you should!

Database Update

This release requires a database update, as we’ve added a new table to the WooCommerce database structure. This table is critical to processing orders and checkout and is installed automatically after updating.

NOTE: This change has been removed from the 4.1 release, in the interest of adding resiliency around these kinds of changes.

Nudge for WordPress Version

Note that there is no change in the minimum requirements for this version.

However, sites not currently running on WordPress 5.2 will see a notification to upgrade to the latest and greatest. Why?

In WooCommerce 4.2, the next release, we are scheduled to update the minimum version of WordPress to 5.2 (now 5.0) to keep up with changes in the WordPress ecosystem.

New Hooks and Functions

We’ve added several new hooks and functions in this release:

FunctionDescription
get_woocommerce_currency_symbols()Returns an array of all registered currency symbols
ActionTriggered
woocommerce_emogrifierBefore an email is run through emogrifier
FilterDescription
woocommerce_can_restock_refunded_itemsPrevents stock from being increased by refunds
woocommerce_order_get_tax_locationEnables filtering of the location that an order should be taxed for
woocommerce_product_upsells_products_headingAllows for filtering of the heading text for product upsells

Template File Changes

The following template file has been updated:

FileChanges
emails/admin-cancelled-order.phpWording of this notice

Release Schedule

Here are our targets for the 4.1 release cycle:

VersionRelease
BetaApril 7th
Release CandidateApril 21st
4.1 ReleaseMay 5th

Testing

If you’d like to dive in and help test this new release, our handy WooCommerce Beta Tester plugin allows you to switch between beta versions and release candidates.

A set of testing instructions has been published on our Wiki page in GitHub. We’ve also posted a helpful writeup on beta testing to help get you started.

If you discover any bugs during the testing process, please let us know by logging a report in GitHub.

Thanks to all of our testers and contributors!

6 responses to “WooCommerce 4.1 Beta 1”

  1. Sounds like an interesting update. However, I’m surprised that the new table is barely mentioned, especially since “this table is critical to processing orders and checkout and is installed automatically after updating.” What is that table for?

    1. Maybe my question slipped through some cracks? 😀

    2. vedjain Avatar

      Hi, this table is called wc_reserved_stock and will be used to implement atomicity in products, i.e. it will help in making sure that even if there are many concurrent checkout requests, a product whose stock is being managed will not be oversold.

      We are currently drafting a dev note for this feature which we are aiming to publish sometime mid-next week, so stay tuned on this blog. However, meanwhile, you can take a look at the pull request which introduced this table: https://github.com/woocommerce/woocommerce/pull/25708

  2. nice work, keep up the good work.
    excellent

  3. Nice to hear that, I’m using the WooCommerce on several websites, so I will test the new version.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *