WooCommerce Community News: February 2021

A note from your developer advocate

Howdy, Woo Developer Community! 👋 As many folks may know, we facilitate a Community Chat in the #core channel of the WooCommerce Community Slack every month. This chat typically occurs the last week of the month and, for folks who attend regularly, you may have noticed that we didn’t hold that meeting this week. We want to make sure we’re engaging with the Woo Developer Community in a meaningful and efficient way, so we’re currently rethinking the way we deliver these chats.

We want to hear from you

If you’re reading this, drop us a line in the comments below to let us know what an ideal community chat would look and feel like to you. What do you like about our current chat? What would you improve? Would you prefer a different time or delivery format? What would the agenda look like?

In the meantime, here are some updates of recent happenings that you may have missed over the past month. We normally cover these items in our chat, but we’ve packaged them into a digest here to help keep everyone in the loop.

Developer Resources

• One of our WooCommerce Admin engineers published a great tutorial on adding columns to analytics reports and CSV downloads
• For folks who are looking for help getting started with end-to-end testing of their extensions, take a look at this recent post about our End-to-End Testing Boilerplate, which orchestrates WooCommerce end-to-end testing tools into a foundation for E2E testing that developers can build upon.
• There was a recent developer advisory notifying developers that the @wordpress/components code that was previously bundled into WooCommerce Admin has been removed, resulting in a package this is now ~650kb lighter.
• One of the new features on the WooCommerce Admin home screen is the Setup Tasks component. Take a look at this tutorial we published on how to add your own setup tasks.

WooCommerce Core

• WooCommerce 5.0 was released on February 9th, 2021. As we mentioned previously in our announcement about transitioning to WordPress versioning, this was a minor release and was built with backwards compatibility as a priority. You can read about some of the notable fixes and improvements in the release announcement linked above.
• The WooCommerce 5.1 Release Candidate is now available. This update is focused primarily on bug fixes and performance improvements. Notable changes include:
  • WooCommerce Admin 2.0 and WooCommerce Blocks 4.4 (see the sections below for more info)
  • Updates to several deprecated jQuery 3 functions (a big thanks to @helgatheviking! 🎉)
  • Filters for modifying exportable product types and hold time for stock on unpaid orders.
• The final release of WooCommerce 5.1 is slated for March 9th, 2021.

WooCommerce Admin

• WooCommerce Admin 2.0 was released February 11, 2021. This new version contains lots of bug fixes and stability improvements. Enhancements include the option to create products from templates and improvements to the PHP test suite to address intermittent MySQL errors.
• The WooCommerce 2.1.0 beta was released February 22. It contains numerous improvements, including some re-engineered settings pages and the ability for merchants to favorite extensions.
• The final release of version 2.1 is slated for March 1, 2021

WooCommerce Blocks

• WooCommerce Blocks 4.4 was released on February 3, 2021. This release included several small tweaks and bug fixes across blocks to fix markup issues and improve accessibility. This release introduced a change to the star-rating class name to prevent naming conflicts.
• There are ongoing efforts toward compatibility improvements to prepare for subscriptions support and widget areas that will soon be landing in WordPress core.
• WooCommerce Blocks 4.5 was released on February 16, 2021. A fix release (WooCommerce Blocks 4.5.1) was released shortly thereafter to correct for an unforeseen deployment issue that caused some users to receive a development version of the Blocks plugin when updating. This release includes several bug fixes and other improvements, including:
  • Updates to the design and layout of the payment methods section
  • Improved error notices for users related to stock checks and coupon validation
  • Improved conditional rendering of links to Terms and Conditions and Privacy Policy pages.

As always, feel free to ask us questions in the comments below or in the #developers channel of the WooCommerce Community Slack.