WooCommerce 4.3 Beta 1

Peter Fabian Avatar
Peter Fabian

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Hello everyone,

Continuing in our monthly release cadence, we’re excited to present to you our first beta version for the July release of WooCommerce–version name 4.3 beta 1!

As of today, WooCommerce 4.3 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 4.3?

New Home page experience

We’re bringing you a completely new home page for a more focused experience that enables easier store management. It includes just the 3 most important items for merchants to glance at:

  • the inbox messages,
  • a quick overview of the common store metrics, and
  • shortcuts pointing to the most used settings

We’re happy to hear your feedback and thoughts on the new home page and hope we can make it into a central place of the WooCommerce experience.

Blocks update

With this release, we’re including a lot of improvements from the Blocks world. Among others:

  • A new status for orders: “draft”
  • All “Product Grid” type blocks now default to 3 rows instead of one for the initial settings
  • HTML editing is no longer supported in several blocks to prevent accidental breakage
  • More options available for Filter Products by Attribute block
  • Improved handling of taxes for Filter Products by Price block
  • Styling consistency and CSS improvements

If you have any of the Product Grid blocks (except All Products) in use on your site, and you never changed any of the default settings for the block, then the block will update to 3 rows instead of 1 row for the rendered products. However, if the block was saved to your content with settings changed, then the rendered content will not be affected. So you will want to double-check your blocks after the update.

Please note that for now, Cart and Checkout blocks are not enabled in the bundled version of Blocks. If you want to use those, please install the separate Blocks plugin.

Miscellaneous improvements

Besides adding new features, we are continuously working on improving the experience of the core plugin as well. We have:

  • improved concurrency handling for stock level management
  • added a new Verify database tool to rebuild the database schema
  • fixed CSV import and export tool bugs
  • improved template caching in container environments
  • fixed erroneous behavior of add-to-cart links

If you would like to know more, please review our full changelog.

PHP version support

As the world of WordPress is preparing for upgrading minimum requirement for PHP to 7.2+, we are following the suit. We will be increasing the version required to run WooCommerce to PHP 7.2 soon as well. With WooCommerce 4.3, to provide enough lead time for merchants and store owners, we will start displaying a recommendation to update to PHP 7.2+.

PHP versions up to 7.1 are not receiving security updates anymore, so we definitely recommend not postponing this decision.

Extension compatibility warning

After discussions with our teams and with external teams developing extensions, we have decided to remove the warning for compatibility for minor WooCommerce versions and only display it for major versions.

Since we strive to produce backward compatible releases and we decided to increase the cadency of our releases to monthly, releasing extensions just to declare compatibility with the new WooCommerce became a burden for developers. We believe our focus on ensuring compatibility and improved testing procedures would enable us to catch potential problems early. Therefore, we think this step can ease the burden of development teams without negative effects on our customers and merchants. We will keep evaluating this decision through our support channels to identify potential problems in this approach.

New Hooks and Functions

We’ve got lots of new actions and filters for everyone to play with:

FilterDescription
woocommerce_status_widget_low_in_stock_count_pre_queryAllows filtering the low stock count in the stock dashboard widget.
woocommerce_status_widget_out_of_stock_count_pre_queryAllows filtering the out of stock count in the stock dashboard widget.
woocommerce_get_path_define_tokensAllows filtering the path constants to manage when tokenizing template file paths.
woocommerce_hold_stock_for_checkoutAllows for filtering whether or not the hold stock functionality should be enabled or disabled.
woocommerce_add_payment_method_form_is_validAllows for filtering whether or not a payment method should be allowed to be added.
woocommerce_hide_base_tables_missing_nagAllows for filtering whether or not the base table missing notice should be shown.
woocommerce_settings_featuresAllows for filtering the features advanced settings.
ActionDescription
woocommerce_add_payment_method_form_bottomExecutes in the templates/myaccount/form-add-payment-method.php template right above the add button.
woocommerce_before_get_rates_for_packageExecutes before the shipping rates for a package are fetched from a shipping method.
woocommerce_after_get_rates_for_packageExecutes after the shipping rates for a package are fetched from a shipping method.

New database tables

We’ve added a new database table called wc_reserved_stock to allow for better stock management and help with handling concurrent requests. Our solution should prevent stock levels to drop below zero, as it sometimes happened previously.

Release Schedule

Here are our targets for the 4.3 release cycle:

VersionRelease
BetaJune 16th
Release CandidateJune 23th
4.3 Final ReleaseJuly 7th

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!

Keep yourself in the loop!

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13 responses to “WooCommerce 4.3 Beta 1”

  1. Daniel Avatar
    Daniel

    Updated to this beta test on a staging site from 4.2, so far everything works fine, I’ll keep checking! Two minor questions: the database was updated and the new table properly created, but no message was displayed that a db update was required. An action was run with this parameters: 0=>wc_admin_update_130_remove_dismiss_action_from_tracking_opt_in_note’ and completed, and this action: woocommerce_cleanup_draft_orders was completed and scheduled and pending for the next day(i ‘ve never saw this one…). Thanks a lot!!!!! Keep up the good work! and please always prefer stability, robustness and backward compatibility in the new releases…there are a lot of sites that depend on somewhat old code, 3rd world gateways not updated etc…

    Reply
    1. Peter Fabian Avatar
      Peter Fabian

      Thanks for testing and providing your feedback, Daniel!

      Reply
    2. carrichs Avatar
      carrichs

      How do I fix this “woocommerce_cleanup_draft_orders”? It shows pending since yesterday. Ran it and still there. Tried to regenerate product lookup table and it still show as pending. I cant not use the search function. Would you be able to find a solution to this?

      Reply
      1. Peter Fabian Avatar
        Peter Fabian

        Hi WillyBob, it’s a new regular task that clean ups draft orders. Draft orders are created by the new Blocks checkout when customers go through the checkout to reserve stock and temporarily store other data about the order as it’s getting created. There should be no need to worry about this task, it just runs once a day and removes some clutter from the database.

        Reply
        1. WillyBob Avatar
          WillyBob

          Thank you. Ever since the update, I was unable to use the search function from storefront and woocommerce. Before update, everything works perfectly. Any suggestion on how to fix this? Thanks in advance.

          Reply
          1. Peter Fabian Avatar
            Peter Fabian

            Hi WillyBob,

            I’ve seen a similar bug report, but wasn’t able to reproduce the problem. Have you tried to check for potential plugin conflicts? If you find steps to reproduce it, please let us know and raise an issue in GitHub. Thanks!

  2. jkohlbach Avatar
    jkohlbach

    “After discussions with our teams and with external teams developing extensions, we have decided to remove the warning for compatibility for minor WooCommerce versions and only display it for major versions.

    Since we strive to produce backward compatible releases and we decided to increase the cadency of our releases to monthly, releasing extensions just to declare compatibility with the new WooCommerce became a burden for developers.”

    THANK YOU!

    Although I didn’t actually hear from anyone from the core team when I posted on slack and FB group about this, I do appreciate being heard and it’s really comforting to know that people are listening when we give feedback.

    I’m sure I can speak for many other 3rd party devs when I say “thank you for listening” and “we appreciate it” 🙂

    Reply
  3. diego.zanella Avatar
    diego.zanella

    Thanks for the update. Important question: how is the stats widget populated? Does it come from WC Admin as well? There’s an open issue with the “dashboard” section and the reports introduced by WC Admin, which causes it to show the wrong figures in a multi-currency environment. As of today, there’s no way to fix that error due to the lack of filters to alter the query fetched by the reports. If the stats widget follows the same logic, it could be affected by the same issue. It wouls be worth sorting that out sooner, rather than later. ☺

    Reply
    1. Peter Fabian Avatar
      Peter Fabian

      Hi Diego, thanks for your feedback. Yes, the widget gets populated from WC Admin and Jetpack data, so I assume it will cause similar problems. Tagging @timmydcrawford in case there are any new plans around multicurrency support I’m not aware of.

      Reply
      1. diego.zanella Avatar
        diego.zanella

        Thanks for the information. Timmy and I have been working together to facilitate the introduction of multi-currency support in the WC Admin tool. There are still a couple of pending issues (the ones I mentioned), which I already reported to him and to the WC Admin team. They have been “pending” for quite a while, but if they are addressed, that should allow to make the stats widget work correctly too.

        Reply
  4. Mahmut Yavsn Avatar
    Mahmut Yavsn

    Hi

    I’m not a developer but i’m following Woocommerce Blog almost daily. Woocommerce is a great ecommerce cms and it’s growing really fast cause and thanks for that. But in some core features there are huge disabilities like stock managment in variable products or filtering in variable products especially when a customer try to filter a size attribute filtering not working efficient and also big performance improvements is very important in ecommerce. Woocommerce 3.6 updates was very efficent about it. Actually, what I want to tell is that there is a subject that can be improved some minor updates can be really minor. I hope i explained myself correctly . I really appreciate your works and i really enjoy when i use it and seeing what it is evolving.

    Thanks

    Reply
    1. Peter Fabian Avatar
      Peter Fabian

      Hi Mahmut, thanks for your feedback!

      But in some core features there are huge disabilities like stock managment in variable products or filtering in variable products especially when a customer try to filter a size

      I have some good news for you: both low stock threshold for variations and filtering based on attributes are being worked on by the developers in our team. Not going to promise any dates, but the features are in development.

      Reply
  5. Rodolphe Avatar
    Rodolphe

    Hello,

    Your improvements and new features look cool and are in line with the impulse you want to give to Woocommerce. I wanted to know if you had planned on your roadmap for the next major versions of 4.0 to design dark mode?

    Otherwise, keep doing what you’re doing 😉

    Reply

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