WooCommerce 9.6.1: Dot Release

WooCommerce 9.6.1 has been released

This release unveils elements of Woo’s new logo, color palette, and related brand updates.

Current Stable Tag

WooCommerce 9.6.1

  • Release — February 4, 2025

What’s in this release

🚀 WooCommerce rebranding rollout #54802

This release unveils elements of Woo’s new logo, color palette, and related brand updates.

This visual refresh is just one part of a broader effort to improve flexibility and control for running WooCommerce at scale. While this release focuses on small UI updates, it aligns with ongoing work to enhance the platform’s extensibility and maintain its open-source foundation.

The updated brand elements are part of the visual face of our plans to continue our investment in performance and shipping a version of WooCommerce that ticks all the boxes essential for a modern commerce experience.


14 responses to “WooCommerce 9.6.1: Dot Release”

  1. Did this really need a point release? I only just finished updating a fleet of sites to 9.6.0 🤕

    1. Hi Phil! We wanted to make sure that we didn’t package these changes with anything else, to make a potential roll-back safer. If you’d like to wait to update to 9.7, it’s perfectly reasonable.

      1. Ok thanks for confirming, I’ll skip this one if it is just the visual changes.

        1. Based on https://github.com/woocommerce/woocommerce/issues/55165, I’m glad I didn’t update yet.

          Sigh. Being a WooCommerce admin/developer is getting more painful each month.

          1. Shani Banerjee Avatar
            Shani Banerjee

            Definite apologies Phil, we have a team assigned to this issue. Feel free to reach out to any developer advocates on slack if you would like to share further feedback about your painpoints.

  2. No Pineapple Avatar
    No Pineapple

    There are maintenance release and security release. What we have here is a fresh coat of paint release (ie lipstick on a pig). Why could this not have been part of 9.6 itself or 9.7, or even the pineapple on pizza release.

    1. Brent MacKinnon Avatar
      Brent MacKinnon

      For the brand refresh, we chose to release it separately so we could have control to roll things back easily if needed, without affecting other updates. Since it’s purely visual, feel free to skip this one if you’d rather wait – your store will work just fine either way.

  3. Brent,
    “PATCH version when you make backward compatible bug fixes”
    source : https://semver.org/

    this is NOT a backward compatible bug fixes.
    This is a retheming, that BRAKES all the consistency of the existing designs.
    (neutral colors that were left as default on client’s theme-> woo branded colors)
    It should have been release as a THEME, not as a core css.
    Colors is a matter of taste, I hate it, some might love it, but in any case it must not be imposed by default to all woocommerce users which carefully crafted their visual identity but left a few gray borders as neutral that suddenly turned purple.

    You don’t respect semver, you don’t respect users.
    dot versions (patch versions) are supposed to be automatically applied as fix or security patches
    This is , in all account , a bad decision.
    It’s 3AM, I have to work in emergency to fix theming for all my clients ..

    and No, we can’t just “skip” the version : if you release a 0-day security patch release tomorrow , 9.6.2; it will embark the (ugly) theming, you’re lefting us no choice.

    So I have to fix it instead of sleeping. I hate with every fiber of my being all the people responsible for this decision.

    1. Brent MacKinnon Avatar
      Brent MacKinnon

      WooCommerce doesn’t use semantic versioning (SemVer). We follow WordPress’s versioning scheme since we’re a WordPress plugin – that’s why our version numbers look similar to WordPress core’s.

      The brand refresh only affects the WordPress admin interface – it doesn’t change any front-end styling on your client sites. If you’re seeing purple borders or other unexpected changes on your store fronts, that’s not related to this update.

      If you’re seeing front-end styling changes, could you open a GitHub issue with examples? That would help us investigate what’s actually causing them.

      About automatic updates – I understand your concern, but WordPress plugin auto-updates are opt-in. If you’ve enabled them, that was a choice made in your WordPress settings. For mission-critical client sites, we generally recommend testing updates in staging first, regardless of version number.

  4. @brent
    thank you for your answer,

    WooCommerce doesn’t use semantic versioning (SemVer). We follow >WordPress’s versioning scheme since we’re a WordPress plugin – that’s >why our version numbers look similar to WordPress core’s.

    Still, in WP versionning a minor WordPress version is “intended for bugfixes and enhancements” and should not modify the front end of customers

    The brand refresh only affects the WordPress admin interface – it doesn’t >change any front-end styling on your client sites. If you’re seeing purple >borders or other unexpected changes on your store fronts, that’s not
    related to this update.

    wrong. plain wrong, that’s the whole point of my message and my anger.
    If it was the case, it would have been ok.

    I already done the investigation for you,
    It’s from commit
    https://github.com/woocommerce/woocommerce/commit/903ce08690f31bf58e001368ebac6e7fabcd7747

    embeded into branding commit
    https://github.com/woocommerce/woocommerce/commit/daa09c41195c66c8d296203fcd699a32af63d32a#diff-aeadbcf6b49219a4a73df1e7d4f6213126f161520a4da79ec95abbc48f8e74be

    –> examples
    9.6.0
    .woocommerce-error, .woocommerce-info, .woocommerce-message {
    background-color: #f6f5f8;
    color: #515151;
    }
    div.payment_box, .woocommerce-cart #payment div.payment_box, .woocommerce-checkout #payment div.payment_box {
    background-color: #dcd7e3;
    color: #515151;
    }

    9.6.1
    .woocommerce-error, .woocommerce-info, .woocommerce-message {
    background-color: #efe5fa;
    color: #47276d;
    }
    #add_payment_method #payment div.payment_box, .woocommerce-cart #payment div.payment_box, .woocommerce-checkout #payment div.payment_box {
    background-color: #d4bbf2;
    color: #47276d;
    }

    so the payement box which was let “neutral-grey” on all my customer’s theme has now become “woocommerce purple” which breaks client’s visual identity.

    If you’re seeing front-end styling changes, could you open a GitHub issue
    with examples
    sure, done :
    https://github.com/woocommerce/woocommerce/issues/55241

    About automatic updates – I understand your concern, but WordPress
    plugin auto-updates are opt-in. If you’ve enabled them, that was a choice
    made in your WordPress settings

    In an ideal world, I would agree with you.
    But in real world it’s not feasible, that’s hundreds of minor updates per month on all the dependency base, a full time job wouldn’t be enough.

    So our decision at our agency is to trust editors to respect their versionning, and automatically updates the minor+patches dependencies, while manually testing on staging the major updates; so we are up-to-date with security patches.

    Arno

    1. Brent MacKinnon Avatar
      Brent MacKinnon

      You’re right! Sorry for the wrong information above, those colours indeed make it to frontend for themes that didn’t change it. We’re looking internally into how to best handle this for this release. I’ll ping some folks who worked on this to respond to your issue.

      Thanks Arno

  5. Thank you for the consideration and actions Brent.
    Great community management despite my angry message.

    1. Brent MacKinnon Avatar
      Brent MacKinnon

      No worries!

      If I woke up at 3 AM to surprise purple payment boxes, I’d probably be typing in all caps too 😄

      If you’re in our community Slack, feel free to ping me directly if you spot anything else that needs attention – I’ll make sure it gets to the right people.

  6. Where can i change the damn color man wtf!! You just change the color but there is no option to set it anywhere? What is this??

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