WooCommerce Community News: August 2021

Howdy, Woo Developer Community! 👋 Here are some updates of recent happenings that you may have missed over the past month. Some items are detailed in previous posts on this blog, and other items are pulled from sources like GitHub. We’ve packaged everything into a digest to help keep everyone in the loop.

Developer Resources

• ICYMI: We recently completed the publication of a developer guide on Testing Extensions and Maintaining Quality Code.
• Developers who build with extensions that involve stock management may want to check out a recent advisory about improvements to queries for products that are low in stock. It also includes guidance about adopting new REST endpoints.
• There was a recent preview of some attribute filtering improvements that are landing soon. These changes are especially notable because some of the work behind them ties into exploratory work related to custom tables in WooCommerce.
• If you’re working with WooCommerce Stripe, be sure to check out an upcoming change to its support policy.
• Finally, any developers who work with WooCommerce Blocks should take a look at this thorough high-level overview of the WooCommerce Blocks Roadmap that outlines plans for the Cart & Checkout Blocks as well as Full Site Editing support.

WooCommerce Core

• WooCommerce 5.6 was released on August 17th, 2021. As previously mentioned, this version followed a slightly modified release schedule. It includes numerous fixes and enhancements, such as the option to enable a lookup table to improve filtering by attributes, new versions of WooCommerce Admin and WooCommerce Blocks, and support for a “shipping phone” to accompany Billing Phone. You can read more about everything that has changed in the changelog for WooCommerce 5.6.
• The Release Candidate for WooCommerce 5.7 was released on August 31, 2021 and is currently available for testing. In addition to updated versions of WooCommerce Admin and WooCommerce Blocks, it also includes improvements, such as a redesigned Marketplace section, as well as fixes that revert the legacy Select2 library back to version 4.0.3 and better support for local currency formatting. You can read more about this version in the release posts for WooCommerce 5.7 beta and WooCommerce 5.7 RC 1 or see a full list of everything in the changelog file for WooCommerce 5.7. 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. You can also download the release from WordPress.org.

WooCommerce Admin

• WooCommerce Admin 2.5.0 was released on August 9, 2021. It includes over 60 different fixes, enhancements, and tweaks, that you can read about in the Changelog.txt file for WooCommerce Admin 2.5.0.
• WooCommerce Admin 2.6.0 was released August 31, 2021. It includes improvements to Marketing Task features, updates to the Jest package dependency, and fixes for issues related to the rendering of the ReportTable component. You can read more about everything that has changed in the changelog.txt file accompanying this release.

WooCommerce Blocks

• WooCommerce Blocks 5.6.0 was released on August 2, 2021. It includes a number of enhancements and bug fixes, such as improvements to the SKU search on the products endpoint of the Store API and a fix for the memory leak that was occurring when previewing transform options for the All Reviews block. Keeping with what was previously announced, this is the first release of WooCommerce Blocks that adheres to an L0 version support policy. Stores who want to update to this version of WooCommerce Blocks will need to be running at least WordPress 5.8 and WooCommerce 5.5.
• WooCommerce Blocks 5.7.0 was released on August 17, 2021. It brings improvements to the Featured Category Block that let users re-select categories using the edit icon, as well as numerous bug fixes for things like theme support and accessibility. As was the case for WooCommerce Blocks 5.6.0, this release adheres to a L0 version support policy.
• In case you missed it above, any developers who work with WooCommerce Blocks should take a look at this thorough high-level overview of the WooCommerce Blocks Roadmap that outlines plans for the Cart & Checkout Blocks as well as Full Site Editing support.

We want to hear from you

If you’re reading this, drop us a line in the comments below to let us know how you’re liking this community news format. We want to make sure we’re sharing information and engaging with the community in an impactful and efficient way. And as always, feel free to ask us questions in the comments below or join us for Developer Office Hours on Wednesdays at 14:00 UTC in the #developers channel of the WooCommerce Community Slack.