WooCommerce Community News: May 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

• If you’re a merchant or developer who works with WooCommerce Payments, you may want to check out the recent advisory about the new version support policy coming to WooCommerce Payments.
• Speaking of version-support-related advisories, be sure to take a look at the news about the plan to drop support for IE 11 in WooCommerce.
• Be on the lookout for a dedicated developer guide on testing and quality for all the things you’re building with WooCommerce. We’re publishing it incrementally and refining it based on feedback from the community. You can see what has been published by visiting the table of contents.

WooCommerce Core

• WooCommerce 5.3 was released on May 11, 2021. It includes numerous fixes and enhancements, such as updated versions of WooCommerce Admin and WooCommerce Blocks. It also includes updates to filters and enhancements to REST API endpoints for managing tax rates.
• The WooCommerce 5.4 Release Candidate is now available for testing. It includes fixes for issues related to jQuery 3, improvements to the REST API endpoints involving date-constrained queries. You can help us test out this release candidate using the WooCommerce Beta Tester plugin.
• The final release of WooCommerce 5.4 is slated for June 8, 2021.

WooCommerce Admin

• WooCommerce Admin 2.3.0 was released May 13, 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.
• There is an open request for comments about a forthcoming plan to remove the ability to programmatically disable WooCommerce Admin via the woocommerce_admin_disabled filter.
• Recent fixes to the date package that WooCommerce Admin and other extensions use sparked an exploration of how to chart analytical data for comparisons involving leap years.
• A number of fixes and enhancements will be landing in WooCommerce Admin 2.4.0 when it is released. Take a look at the changelog to see the full list.

WooCommerce Blocks

• WooCommerce Blocks 5.1.0 was released on May 10, 2021. Highlights include better error reporting for payment methods with dependencies that are unavailable, improvements to the emitEventWithAbort function that some event emitters use, and a fix for a bug that would clear out previously entered address data during checkout.
• WooCommerce Blocks 5.2.0 was released May 26, 2021. It includes incremental updates to the design of the order breakdown area in the Cart and Checkout blocks, as well as improvements aimed at compatibility with the new widget editor coming with WordPress 5.8.

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.