Hello everyone,
Starting with the release of WooCommerce 4.2, we will be switching to a monthly release cadence! We’ve worked hard over the last year to increase both the frequency and stability of our releases, and we feel confident in taking this next step.
As of today, WooCommerce 4.2 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 4.2?
As with our previous release, we have been continuing to focus on stability and performance in this cycle. You can review our changelog for the granular details, but here is a broad overview of what’s new:
WordPress Support Policy
Starting with the 4.2 release, we will adapt an L-2 sliding window support policy. What this means is that we are committed to ensuring that WooCommerce Core will work with the current WordPress version, as well as the two previous release branches.
You can read more about this new policy on our developer blog post.
New Hooks and Functions
We’ve added one new hook in this release:
| Filter | Description |
|---|---|
| woocommerce_menu_order_count | Enables filtering for the count of processing orders shown in the menu. |
We’ve also made some changes to a few hooks:
| Filter | Description |
|---|---|
| woocommerce_matched_rates | Added the customer as a third argument. |
| woocommerce_attribute_label | Fixed a bug that caused the prefix of global attributes to be removed from the second argument. |
Release Schedule
Here are our targets for the 4.2 release cycle:
| Version | Release |
|---|---|
| Beta | May 12th |
| Release Candidate | May 19th |
| 4.2 Release | June 2nd |
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!
Develop with Woo 
10 replies on “WooCommerce 4.2 Beta 1”
Question – does this mean the scope of changes in minors will be reduced as well?
Just FYI, 1 month rolling cycles are short for 3rd party devs depending on scope. Other than that 🤘
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The scope of each release will be variable, but the plan is that nothing will be delivered in Core until it’s thoroughly tested. Once a feature is ready to be shipped it will be included in the next release cycle.
With that said however, any changes that will affect developers should be announced in advance of their inclusion in Core. We take care in examining the impact of a given change to ensure ample notice when possible!
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Does this upgrade from 4.1 to 4.2beta requires a database update? and if is this the case, are new tables created? Thanks in advance!
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No new tables!
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Does this upgrade requires updating the database? Are new tables being created? Thanks in advance!
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No new database tables in this release! In the future, would it be better if we noted that in the blog instead of omitting the section entirely?
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Yes please! Tanks!
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+1 on that man.
Honestly, the more detail in these notices the better IMHO. We feed this blog into Slack so it keeps our whole team apprised.
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1 new hook and changes in 2 previous hooks. Seems interesting! Thank you for your contribution!
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Hi…i’ve updated to 4.2beta from 4.1 on a staging site and it doesn’t show 4.2beta as version in woocommerce status after update, neither in version used or in database version(the plugin files were updated fine). Thanks!
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