WooCommerce 4.3 is now available!

We are excited to announce that WooCommerce 4.3 is now publicly available! It has been in development since April 2020 and the core has been updated with 272 commits from 24 contributors.

This is a minor release, which means everything is backward compatible with the previous version.

As always, we recommend creating a backup of your site and making sure that themes and plugins are compatible before updating. You can check out this update guide for more information.

What’s new in 4.3?

As with all minor releases, we are bringing you several new features that we’d like to highlight:

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.

The new home page is available for all new customers by default. If you’re upgrading from an earlier version, you can turn it on via WooCommerce > Settings > Advanced > Features > Home Screen.

You can also check out our new documentation section that covers the Home Screen functionality.

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 โ€œProduct Gridโ€ 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 PHP version recommendation to PHP to 7.2+, we are following the suit. 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 added some new hooks in this release:

FilterDescription
woocommerce_before_get_rates_for_packageFires before getting shipping rates for a package.
woocommerce_after_get_rates_for_packageFires after getting shipping rates for a package.
woocommerce_add_payment_method_form_is_validVerify the received form data when adding a new payment method.
woocommerce_add_payment_method_form_bottomAdd additional markup at the bottom of the form to add a new payment method.
woocommerce_status_widget_low_in_stock_count_pre_queryCustomize the low stock threshold to use for the low stock status widget.
woocommerce_status_widget_out_of_stock_count_pre_queryCustomize the no stock threshold to use for the no stock status widget.
woocommerce_hide_base_tables_missing_nagCustomize the notice that appears when database tables are missing.
woocommerce_checkout_order_createdFired after an order is created.
woocommerce_checkout_order_exceptionFired when an order is discarded due to Exception.
woocommerce_before_get_rates_for_packageFires before getting shipping rates for a package.
woocommerce_after_get_rates_for_packageFires after getting shipping rates for a package.
woocommerce_get_path_define_tokensCustomize the list of constants to be used in path tokenization.
woocommerce_hold_stock_for_checkoutAllows enable/disable hold stock functionality on checkout.
woocommerce_rest_performance_indicators_data_valueCustomize admin reports.
admin_body_classAdd theme class to admin body.
woocommerce_blocks_register_script_dependenciesAdd payment method script handles as script dependencies.
enqueue_block_editor_assetsEnqueue assets used for rendering the block in editor context.
wc_order_statusesRegister custom order status for orders created via the API during checkout.
woocommerce_register_shop_order_post_statusesRegister custom order post status for orders created via the API during checkout.
woocommerce_valid_order_statuses_for_paymentAppend draft status to a list of statuses.
woocommerce_cleanup_draft_ordersDelete too old draft orders.

 

Minimum WordPress Requirement

This version keeps the minimum WordPress version of 5.2 that was introduced in 4.2. Remember that you can read all about the new WordPress support policy in the developer blog post detailing it.

How was 4.3 tested?

We’ve been hard at work iterating on our testing procedures over the last few releases and we’re very satisfied with the level of stability we’ve managed to achieve in being so meticulous.

  • We have decided to continue using an external agency. Their manual testing of our product on a variety of browsers and operating systems has proven effective in finding bugs before the release.
  • We have started to shift some of the extensive testing upstream internally in order to decrease the feedback loop during WooCommerce Core releases.
  • The shift the monthly releases will dramatically decrease the testing surface, leading to smaller and more stable releases.

Much ๐Ÿ’œ to all the contributors

Finally a big thanks to everyone in the community who has contributed via issue reports, fixestranslation, testing, supporting other users or simply spreading the word.

WooCommerce Core

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ObliviousHarmonyclaudiosanchespeterfabianvedanshujainrrennickmattsherman
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juliaamosovajoshuatfKonamimanAljullubor0tsteur
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tivnettimmycspacedmonkeyDan-QYasienDwiebhelgatheviking
jasonandmontejobthomasbarryhughes   
jasonandmontejobthomasbarryhughes   

WooCommerce Admin

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joshuatfpsealockmattshermanjeffstielerbecdetatrrennick
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jconroydechovoctaedrodanielbitzertimmycclaudiosanches

WooCommerce Blocks

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Aljullunerradmikejolleyhaszarisenadirthenbrent

Action Scheduler

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rrennick     

REST API

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vedanshujain     

19 responses to “WooCommerce 4.3 is now available!”

  1. Updated my sites flawlessly from wc4.2.2. Thanks for the fixes detected at wc4.3beta!

  2. I just updated but I don’t see any changes on WooCommerce desktop page

    1. Peter Fabian Avatar
      Peter Fabian

      Hi,

      Thanks for your comment and for noticing, I’ve updated the article to include this information to prevent more confusion.

      If you mean the new home screen, then it’s not active by default for users upgrading to version 4.3 and you can activate it from WooCommerce > Settings > Advanced > Features > Home Screen.

  3. brookjacoby78 Avatar
    brookjacoby78

    Hi there, it seems that WooCommerce doesn’t work with Divi anymore…

    1. Peter Fabian Avatar
      Peter Fabian

      Hi,

      Thanks for the comment. Can you please be more specific? I’ve just tested WC 4.3 with the latest Divi and can see blog, shop, can add to cart, and check out correctly.

      1. brookyjacoby Avatar
        brookyjacoby

        I updated the memory limit and it works fine now. Thanks!

  4. Updated and unable to use search function.
    woocommerce_cleanup_draft_orders showed up as pending since yesterday. Tried to regenerate product lookup tables and run woocommerce_cleanup_draft_orders again, but still no luck. Is there a solution to this search function? Also we have the YMM plugin (Year Make Model) filter and it’s not filtering as well. Any help will be appreciated. Thank you

    1. Peter Fabian Avatar
      Peter Fabian

      Hi @WillyBob,

      Can you please open an issue in GitHub with steps to reproduce your problem for the search problem? I’ve just tried searching for products by name in admin and on the front end and both seem to work for me. Have you tried to resolve plugin conflicts?

      Thanks!

  5. Where can we find compatibility notes for Authorize.net, PayPal, Jetpack, etc.?

    1. Peter Fabian Avatar
      Peter Fabian

      Hi Brandmetta,

      Apologies, but I’m not quite sure what you mean by compatibility notes? Can you please elaborate?

      We run an automated compatibility check with plugins in the WooCommerce marketplace and reach out to developers of plugins that we identify as potentially incompatible. In addition, we test with some of the most common plugins manually, but we can’t really test with all the plugins, so a lot of the burden of compatibility testing is on each plugin author.

      Hope it helps!
      Cheers, Peter.

  6. ryandgetz Avatar
    ryandgetz

    WC() is no longer available in my custom rest api endpoints

    1. Peter Fabian Avatar
      Peter Fabian

      Hi @ryandgetz,

      Could you please open an issue with steps to reproduce in our GitHub repository? Thanks!

      1. ryandgetz Avatar
        ryandgetz

        Thanks for the reply! Actually, I figured it out. It was something that changed in the woocommerce blocks package that I probably shouldn’t have been relying on, lol.

  7. Ajay Kajla Avatar
    Ajay Kajla

    Hi
    Just check in woocommerce plugin, custom fields added on single product page and when try to add 1 on text box woocommerce wont let it pass rest all value coming but not 1.

    Did anybody fell same way

  8. marcgarner2017 Avatar
    marcgarner2017

    Are you able to give an idea of when the new cart and checkout blocks will be available in the core woocommerce?
    We find the existing checkout is confusing to customers and we love the look of the new checkout experience.
    Thanks.

    1. Gary Murray Avatar
      Gary Murray

      We don’t have a date in place yet for when they will replace the current cart and checkout in WooCommerce core itself as there are a number of payment methods and extensions that add functionality of the cart/checkout that we need to integrate with.

      You can use the new block based cart and checkout though by installing the WooCommerce blocks plugin as mentioned in the post.

  9. Daniel Avatar

    That’s very important. The current checkout works flawlessly with a lot of gateways and extensions around the world with legacy code that are not ready to update. If it’s get replaced we’ll need the old cart available as an option for those of us that can’t smoothly switch. Being always backward compatible is a must in business related code, this is not a game engine. I hope woocommerce will always be conservative over reckless, or give a long term support branch as many software do to keep up with security updates but not chose to upgrade breaking features for our business. Thanks in advance

  10. muchiri124 Avatar
    muchiri124

    Great as Woo-Commerce.

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