WooCommerce 8.2.0 Released

We are pleased to announce the release of WooCommerce 8.2.0. This release should be backwards compatible with the previous version.

This release contains:

622 commits from 55 contributors in WooCommerce Core.
107 commits from 28 contributors in WooCommerce Blocks.

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

PHP Requirement Change

WooCommerce 8.2 requires PHP version 7.4 or newer.

Read our announcement post for full details.

What’s new in 8.2.0?

High Performance Order Storage

High-Performance Order Storage (HPOS) also previously known as “Custom Order Tables” is a solution that provides an easy-to-understand and solid database structure – specifically designed for eCommerce needs. It uses the WooCommerce CRUD design to store order data in custom tables – optimized for WooCommerce queries with minimal impact on the store’s performance.

In January 2022, we published the initial plan for the Custom Order Tables feature and since then, we’ve been working hard to bring the High-Performance Order Storage (HPOS) to WooCommerce Core. In May 2022, we invited you to test the order migration process and provide feedback on how our initial work performs on real stores of varied configurations.

High-Performance Order Storage (HPOS) is officially released in 8.2.0 under the stable flag and is enabled by default for new installations.

Bringing High-Performance Order Storage (HPOS) to WooCommerce improves these three essential properties for eCommerce stores.

Scalability

The rise in the number of customers and customer orders increases the load on your store’s database – making it difficult to handle customer order requests and deliver a seamless user experience.

With High-Performance Order Storage, you get dedicated tables for data like orders and order addresses and thus dedicated indexes which results in fewer read/write operations and fewer busy tables. This feature enables eCommerce stores of all shapes and sizes to scale their business to their maximum potential – without expert intervention.

Reliability

High-Performance Order Storage makes implementing and restoring targeted data backup easier. You’ll no longer need to worry about losing orders, inventory numbers, or client information with reliable backup in these custom order tables. It’ll also facilitate implementing read/write locks and prevent race conditions.

Simplicity

You no longer have to go through a single huge database to locate underlying data and WooCommerce entries.

With High-Performance Order Storage, you can easily browse through the separate tables and easy-to-handle entries, independent of the table _posts, to find data or understand the table structure. It also lets you easily develop new plugins, implement designs for shops and products, and modify WooCommerce with more flexibility.

Please visit the documentation page for more details on the High-Performance Order Storage.

Improve WooCommerce blocks performance for classic themes

We made some changes that will split out the styles for our blocks into individual CSS files when the site uses a classic theme. This has been the case for some time with block themes, and now classic themes can benefit from faster load times and lower resource usage when displaying WooCommerce blocks.

More patterns in the Product Collection block

Two new Product Collection patterns, Rows and Simple Grid, are now available. They offer vertical and horizontal layouts to better showcase products.

New Product Collection block

Product Collection is the newest addition to our block library.

Like the Products block, you can choose what criteria affect the list of blocks displayed to shoppers and control the product layout in the list/grid by the various element blocks.

Unlike the Products block, which is a Query loop block variation, this block is a standalone block, enabling us to tailor the block further to better meet the merchant’s needs.

Existing templates with Product blocks will remain unchanged as we haven’t replaced them with Product Collection blocks yet.

It’s labeled beta because we’re still polishing it. And we look forward to any feedback you have on this block.

Other changes

For a complete list of the changes included in this release, please see the changelog in the readme for this release.

Much 💜 to all the contributors

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