Greetings everyone – we are quite pleased to announced that WooCommerce 3.6 is now available for beta testing!
To test the beta release of 3.6, you can download it directly from GitHub, or install our WooCommerce Beta Tester Plugin which allows you to easily test out this beta and all future beta and release candidates.
What is new in 3.6?
3.6 is the first minor release of 2019 – and being a minor release – everything included in this release is backwards-compatible. This means if you are updating from any version since 3.0, you should encounter no issues.
On to what’s new!
Product Blocks
For readers of the WooCommerce Development blog, you have likely heard of our WooCommerce Product Blocks feature plugin that has been in development and testing for almost a year now. We are excited to bring all eight new editor blocks to the WooCommerce core experience!
For all sites running WordPress 5.0 or newer, you will have access to build rich landing pages using the following blocks shipping in WooCommerce 3.6:
- Products by Category
- Best Selling Products
- Hand-picked Products
- Newest Products
- On Sale Products
- Top Rated Products
- Products by Attribute
- Featured Product
Stay tuned for additional blog posts here that will detail how developers can extend, and control the new Product Blocks.
Performance Improvements
The team has also been hard at work at implementing performance enhancements on the front-end and admin interfaces of WooCommerce. Customers will have a snappier experience on shop and product pages – especially when filtering and sorting products on shop pages.
On the administrative side of the site, numerous improvements have been made to optimize and speed up common management views like the product listing pages. A full list of performance improvements can be seen in the changelog.
Be on the lookout for another post here on the dev blog that will dive into the details of the performance updates.
Additional Updates
In addition to the new Product Blocks and Performance Improvements, you will find the following enhancements in 3.6:
- The ability to increase/decrease stock options via the bulk edit form.
- Accessibility improvements on the shop order-by selector.
- When adding/editing/deleting items manually from orders, the corresponding product stock will be updated to reflect the event, and an order note will also log the action.
- Added suggestions for official extensions.
- Store attribute values as post_excerpt for variations to support easier searching for variations.
- Customer notes containing URLs now automatically converts to clickable links.
- Allow states in zones to be searched by country name.
- Added registration success notices to account pages.
Beyond these enhancements, the release also contains some tweaks, new hooks and fixes – all of which you can find out about in the readme.
Template File Changes
The following template files have been updated in this release
| File | Changes |
| content-product.php | passing $product to wc_product_class() to avoid re-read of product |
| content-single-product.php | passing $product to wc_product_class() to avoid re-read of product |
| single-product-reviews.php | support for wc_review_ratings_enabled() |
| cart/cart-shipping.php | verbiage changes |
| checkout/form-billing.php | update _e usage to esc_html_e |
| checkout/form-shipping.php | update _e usage to esc_html_e |
| emails/admin-cancelled-order.php | Copy reworded, double escape fix. |
| emails/customer-note.php | Made note clickable. |
| global/form-login.php | Update order of remember me and submit buttons |
| global/quantity-input.php | w3C validation fixes |
| loop/orderby.php | added aria label |
| loop/rating.php | star rating bug fix |
| myaccount/form-edit-address.php | Added names to nonces, setting country value bug fix |
| myaccount/form-login.php | Added actions woocommerce_before_lost_password_form and woocommerce_after_lost_password_form |
| order/form-tracking.php | PHPCS |
| single-product/product-attributes.php | Added filter woocommerce_display_product_attributes to give full control of output |
| single-product/rating.php | wc_review_ratings_enabled() support |
| single-product/review-rating.php | wc_review_ratings_enabled() support |
Deprecated functions and Methods
wc_get_min_max_price_meta_query– Removed in favour of lookup tables which remove the need to filter via post meta.- Term meta helper functions – Deprecated in favour of WP core term meta functions such as https://developer.wordpress.org/reference/functions/get_term_meta/. These have not been needed since WP 4.4.
WC_Country::load_country_states– States are now loaded on the fly as needed.WC_Cache_Helper::delete_version_transients– Transients are now versioned within the value negating the need for cleanup.WC_Background_Updater– We’ve switched updates to the ActionScheduler queue.- Simplify Commerce – This gateway has been deprecated for several years and hidden in the UI. The code has now been removed.
Release Schedule
Here is what we are targeting for the rest of the 3.6 release cycle:
| Beta | March 15 |
| RC | March 28 |
| 3.6 Release | April 11 |
If you’d like to help us test, you can use our new WooCommerce Beta Tester plugin. We posted a nice little write-up on beta testing here which should get you started. Please read that and jump right in!
Thanks to all of our testers and contributors!
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