WooCommerce Community News: April 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

• We’re continuing to revise and refine some of our developer guidance around building React-powered interfaces with components. We made recent updates that feature function-based components and React hooks, which are quickly becoming the standard across the WordPress ecosystem.
• Be on the lookout for updated guidance around all things related to testing in WooCommerce, including concepts and tooling, as well as best practices for writing and running tests.
• The teams who maintain WooCommerce have released several recent updates to some of the underlying Node packages that power the Woo ecosystem. If you’re a developer who relies on any of these resources, take a look at some of the updates that have recently been published to NPM:
  • New Packages
    • Customer Effort Score – Initial release of a package to help measure customer satisfaction.
    • Experimental – Initial release of a package intended to help fortify import statements as components transition from experimental to non-experimental.
    • ExPlat – Initial release of a package to help facilitate A/B testing in WooCommerce. You can read more about ExPlat, Automattic’s new experimentation platform, in this recent blog post.
  • Updates
    • API v0.1.2 added support for new product types and coupons.
    • Components v6.0 and v6.1 collectively include enhancements to search components as well as improvements to pagination buttons and other styling.
    • Currency v3.1.0 was published April 12 and includes improvements that localize regional currency for merchant onboarding, as well as a fix that protects against errors if a country code is not available in the locale information.
    • Data v1.2.0 was published April 12 and includes many improvements, such as support for persisted queries in the navigation data store, as well as the addition of a useUser hook.
    • Date v3.0 was published April 12 and includes an enhancement that takes leap year into account when calculating previous periods for comparisons.
    • Dependency Extraction Webpack Plugin v1.5.0 shipped April 16 and added support for the ExPlat and Experimental packages listed above.
    • End-to-End Testing Environment v0.2.1 added support for screenshots during test failures and reporting of errors to Slackbot.
    • End-to-End Core Tests has multiple recent releases that include the addition of over 20 new test flows.
    • Navigation v6.0 was published April 12 and introduced support for adding listeners that respond to history changes along with persisted query management and a new parameter for overriding default pages in WooCommerce Admin.
    • Number v2.1.1 was published April 12 and introduced TypeScript support.

WooCommerce Core

• WooCommerce 5.2 was released on April 13, 2021. It includes numerous fixes and enhancements, such as REST API fixes, a new dashboard widget to help merchants finish setting up their stores and an improvement that adds low stock thresholds for individual variations in variable products. This release also includes updated versions of WooCommerce Admin (2.1.5) and WooCommerce Blocks (4.7).
• The WooCommerce Core team is currently putting increased effort into automating more of the release process. You can read more about these efforts in this recent blog post.
• The Release Candidate for WooCommerce 5.3 was released April 27, 2021. You can help us test it out using the WooCommerce Beta Tester plugin. The final release of version 5.3 is slated for May 11, 2021.

WooCommerce Admin

• The Beta for WooCommerce Admin 2.3.0 was released on April 20, 2021. It includes improvements, tweaks, and fixes for various things, such as support for nonces in Admin Note actions, compatibility for running unit tests in PHP 8, and enhancements to the onboarding plugin installer that allow plugins to be installed and activated via URL query string parameters. Take a look at the changelog see the full list of improvements coming in 2.3.0.

WooCommerce Blocks

• WooCommerce Blocks 4.8 was released on April 1, 2021. It includes enhancements and fixes such as improvements to error handling and an additional property to help components support saved payment methods.
• WooCommerce Blocks 4.9 was released on April 12, 2021. This release include several fixes to styling, alignment, and formatting in blocks and introduces compatibility with the WooCommerce Google Analytics extension that allows block events to be tracked.

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 in the #developers channel of the WooCommerce Community Slack.