WooCommerce 4.4 is now available!

We are excited to announce that WooCommerce 4.4 is now publicly available! It has been in development since July 2020 and the core has been updated with about 450 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 4.4?

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

WooCommerce Blocks Update

This release includes numerous bug fixes and improvements across various blocks. Some notable changes include –

  1. Updating styles across all blocks to make them more consistent and also removed usage of dashicon classes.
  2. Blocks respect the product image cropping settings.
  3. Scripts only relevant to the front-end display of blocks are no longer loaded in the editor.

Centralized Coupon Management

The new coupons menu item – located in the Marketing Hub

Coupons management has been moved to the marketing hub in the WordPress sidebar. There will still be a coupon menu item in the old location, and anyone stumbling upon it will be guided here.

See more details in the original release post.

Filters and actions

We have added a few new filters and updated some of the existing ones:

Filters Description
woocommerce_product_cross_sells_products_heading Allows changing heading for cross selling product section.
woocommerce_enable_nocache_headers Allows not setting no-cache headers to improve performance.
woocommerce_duplicate_product_exclude_meta Added a new parameter $existing_meta_keys
plugins_update_check_locales The default value of the $locales parameter changed to include all locales.
woocommerce_translations_updates_for_{$plugin_name} Allows filtering plugin that are subscribed for automatic translation updates.
woocommerce_bacs_accounts Added a new parameter $order_id
New and changed filters

New action is also added in this release.

Action Description
woocommerce_order_note_added Runs after a new note is added to the order.
New Action

Other notable fixes and improvements

There are lots of fixes and stability improvements in this release, including:

  1. Fixed the visibility of partially out of stock variable products when using the layered nav widget. (#26260)
  2. If you are manually creating a new order, stocks will be updated only after you have saved the order (in any status where stocks are supposed to be reduced like on-hold, completed or processing). Earlier, stocks would have been reduced even if the order was not saved (as soon as products were added). (#26642)
  3. We have added/updated documentation of some deprecated functions (#27054).
  4. We have fixed a couple of issues that surfaced when using the upcoming version 5.5 of WordPress: removed new meta box arrows (#27173) and fixed the “product type” dropdown from product’s data meta box (#27170).
  5. After clicking to update WooCommerce, the user will now stay in the same page instead of being redirected to the “Settings” page (#27172).
  6. Improved order details UI to highlight “Paid” and “Net Payment” sections (#27142).
  7. We removed the JETPACK_AUTOLOAD_DEV define (#27185).
  8. We now trigger the woocommerce_order_item_quantity filter when reserving stock (#27251).

You can find the complete changelog for this release on the changelog.txt file.

Database changes

This release does not require any core database alteration. However, the previous release, 4.3, did introduce a new table, so if you are upgrading from an earlier release than 4.3, make sure that WordPress user has permission to add a new table to the database.

A re-occurring worker will be scheduled after update to backfill product variation data. This worker will process variable products in batches of 100.

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 4.4 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 are still shifting some of the extensive testing upstream internally in order to decrease the feedback loop during WooCommerce Core releases.
  • The shift to monthly releases has effectively decreases the testing surface, leading to smaller and more stable releases.

Much 💜 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

Konamiman claudiosanches vedanshujain ObliviousHarmony peterfabian rrennick
Konamiman claudiosanches vedanshujain ObliviousHarmony peterfabian rrennick
masteradhoc budzanowski vallter2 timmyc tammullen xristos3490
masteradhoc budzanowski vallter2 timmyc tammullen xristos3490
hjoelr matt-h dependabot[bot] yuliyan james-allan jonathansadowski
hjoelr matt-h dependabot[bot] yuliyan james-allan jonathansadowski
Aljullu nerrad dhruvins andrewminion-luminfire om4csaba mch0lic
Aljullu nerrad dhruvins andrewminion-luminfire om4csaba mch0lic
szamanis jeffstieler mahdiyazdani juliaamosova adamradocz
szamanis jeffstieler mahdiyazdani juliaamosova adamradocz

WooCommerce Admin

jeffstieler becdetat octaedro psealock joshuatf timmyc
jeffstieler becdetat octaedro psealock joshuatf timmyc
samueljseay jconroy jameskoster harriswong Ferdev nerrad
samueljseay jconroy jameskoster harriswong Ferdev nerrad
c-shultz ayubadiputra mattsherman aaemnnosttv
c-shultz ayubadiputra mattsherman aaemnnosttv

WooCommerce Blocks

Aljullu nerrad haszari senadir mikejolley LevinMedia
Aljullu nerrad haszari senadir mikejolley LevinMedia
pkelbert
pkelbert

REST API

vedanshujain ObliviousHarmony
vedanshujain ObliviousHarmony

10 responses to “WooCommerce 4.4 is now available!”

  1. Hello! I just updated my WooCommerce plug-in and it triggered a fatal error that crashed my entire site. I recovered it, but WordPress is not allowing me to reactivate WooCommerce because of the fatal error.

    1. Peter Fabian Avatar
      Peter Fabian

      Hi,

      Apologies for the problems you’ve encountered. There was a known conflict between WooCommerce and some other plugins and problems we solved in the subsequent fix releases. I hope you were able to get things working. If not, please contact our support via https://woo.com/contact-us/.
      Thanks.

  2. Version 4.4 is not compatible with my WP Rocket caching plugin. please be aware

    1. Peter Fabian Avatar
      Peter Fabian

      Thanks for reporting, both us and WP Rocket are updating our plugins to resolve the compatibility problem. Update for WP Rocket is already out, WC is coming shortly.

      1. E. Vinje Avatar

        Will you be commenting back here to let us know when the WC update is out?

        1. konamiman Avatar
          konamiman

          It’s live now: WooCommerce 4.4.1. Please give it a try. https://woocommerce.wordpress.com/2020/08/19/woocommerce-4-4-1-fix-release/

  3. My out of stock items are showing even though I have the setting to hide.

    1. Peter Fabian Avatar
      Peter Fabian

      Hi,

      Apologies for the problems and thanks for reporting them. Unfortunately, there were some bugs introduced in version 4.4 that might have caused this. I think they should be resolved in the latest WC version. Please let us know if you still experience these problems.
      Thanks.

  4. Version 4.4 has a bug. Product filter widgets by attributes do not work. I have tested it in several themes and in different wordpress installations

    1. konamiman Avatar
      konamiman

      Hello, is your issue the same as the one described in https://github.com/woocommerce/woocommerce/issues/27419? If not, could you please provide more details?

Leave a Reply

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