Hey, Thats a Handsome Hippo

Today we’re proud to announce that the latest and greatest version of WooCommerce has been released; v2.3, codename Handsome Hippo.

2.3 has been in active development for around 5 months and has seen around 1800 commits from 22 contributors.

What’s New?

As the codename Handsome Hippo (hopefully) suggests, a lot of attention in this release has been paid to WooCommerce’ appearance / UI, on both the front and back end.

• On the frontend we’ve added several little usability enhancements such as:
• A more simplistic ‘flat’ design (for themes without a specific WooCommerce integration) and updated email design
• The ability to remove products from the cart via the cart widget
• Classes / markup for responsive tables (see the orders table on ‘my account’)
• Moved the ‘Proceed to checkout’ button to a more appropriate location
• An ‘undo’ option when removing products from the cart

We’ve also removed a couple of features:

• The +/- quantity increment buttons – `input type=”number”` is well supported making this feature redundant.
• The style settings (button colors etc).
• The ability to create non pre-tax coupons, read full post here

Both of these features can be replaced using their plugin counterparts:

• https://wordpress.org/plugins/woocommerce-colors/
• https://wordpress.org/plugins/woocommerce-quantity-increment/

The WooCommerce colors plugin will automatically detect any previous settings when you activate it so the transition will be smooth should you still need that functionality.

It’s inevitable that some sites/themes will be affected by these changes. If you build WooCommerce themes you are hopefully already up to date with these developments. If you’re a store owner running a third party theme, be sure to read the section on how to upgrade WooCommerce further in this post to make sure you’re prepared. You may even consider reaching out to your theme author directly.

If you’re a developer working with WooCommerce, here are a few other key changes in 2.3:

1. Template debug mode will now remove all template overrides for template loading functions. This is handy if you’re building (or using) a theme which overrides core templates and run into issues. There’s now an easy way to simply turn those templates off to help locate the source of a problem.
2. We’ve switched from LESS to Sass as a CSS pre-processor of choice, and included bourbon giving us access to a whole load more useful mixins. If your theme or extension imports any of our .less files, now would be a good time to make the switch to sass.
3. The order summary and payment section of the checkout have been decoupled making it possible for you to move each component independently via theme/plugin modification. Please note that if your theme currently overrides any of these templates, you will need to update them. See https://github.com/woothemes/woocommerce/tree/master/templates/checkout for the latest.
4. We’ve migrated away from chosen in favour of Select2 for our form enhancement needs. Select2 is the more actively developed script and has been adopted by WordPress core which helps make WooCommerce that little bit more efficient. Chosen is still registered as a script within WooCommerce but if you use that functionality we recommend adopting Select2 asap as chosen will be removed altogether in a future release.
5. We’ve included a new Geolocation class and changed the way taxes are displayed to customers on the frontend. Customers will now see taxes based on their address, and you have the option to enable their location to be geolocated when they visit your store.
6. If you’ve played with the Webhooks API in 2.2 you’ll know that previously they could only be created via API calls. 2.3 includes a Webhooks UI which will allow users to create them via the settings page. For instructions on using Webhooks see: http://docs.woothemes.com/document/webhooks/

How to Upgrade

As always, we recommend making backups, and using a staging environment to test major updates with your themes and plugins prior to pulling the trigger. See our post here for best practices:

http://docs.woothemes.com/document/testing-updates-using-a-staging-environment/

We don’t anticipate major issues with extensions, but themes that override template files (such as those on the cart and checkout pages) should be checked or updated to ensure they are not affected by the UI changes.

How to Report Issues and Contribute to Future Updates

Issues and contributions should be made via Github:

https://github.com/woothemes/woocommerce/issues/new

See our contribution guide here:

https://github.com/woothemes/woocommerce/blob/master/CONTRIBUTING.md

If you are reporting a 2.3 issue, please include steps to replicate the issue and mark your issue [2.3] so they stand out.

How to Contribute the Localizations

If you spot any missing translations, please join us on Transifex:

https://www.transifex.com/projects/p/woocommerce/

It’s free to join and easy to translate strings. Translation updates made through Transifex will be made to all other users

Another huge thankyou to our translators!

The Road to 2.4…

We’re going to be discussing the roadmap for 2.4 in a few weeks, but rumour has it we’ll be looking at the onboarding process specifically to improve usability. Stay tuned!

Edit: We’ve released 2.3.1 to fix some conflicts a few users were finding after using the geolocation features. This prevents some errors if the geolocation DB cannot be downloaded too.