WooCommerce 4 released – Here’s what you need to know!

WooCommerce is a renowned plugin when it comes to WordPress eCommerce online store. It is a revolutionary plugin that has the power to convert a WordPress website into a full-fledged eCommerce site. And on March 10^th, 2020, WordPress released the latest version, WooCommerce 4.0 for the entire eCommerce business community. There were speculations about the release and finally the company made it official. Since 2018, the development of the new version was in process and a long wait two years has come to an end.

Are you excited to unleash the features of WooCommerce 4.0? Pixlogix is here to share the latest features in the new version:

PS: WordPress has recommended testing the upgrade on a staging site copy before upgrading your live store as the version is not fully backward compatible with sites running on different versions of WooCommerce 3x.

Now let’s start with the features of WooCommerce:

WooCommerce Admin

If you’ve been constantly reading all the updates WordPress WooCommerce development blogs, then you might have witnessed the early announcement and later expected release of the feature plugin. As per reports, the plugin has been actively used by 1million stores and finally, WooCommerce is all set to make a mark in the WooCommerce core to bring a set of enhancements for every store owner:

• New and improved reports
• New dashboard
• Improved notification experience
• New store management tools

The enhanced WooCommerce admin provides much superior reporting capabilities than prior versions of reports and facilitate comparisons, filtering, and outline how the store is performing in terms of revenue, sales ads capabilities for better customer management and analytics, and which products are popular/highest grossing.

PS: The previous versions of reports are not removed as WordPress will inform all the businesses and developers with prior notice before taking any step.

WooCommerce custom development export of data from the reports has become easier as CSV enables smooth interoperation with other systems.

Now WooCommerce theme development will become simple as along with admin a new activity panel is added with revised order management workflow and flexibility between the desktop and mobile.

Due to the JavaScript requirements, this experience will be accessible to all stores running WordPress 5.3+. Moreover, the store’s running older versions of WordPress will find WooCommerce Admin automatically disabled from their site.

Action scheduler 3.1

The underlying technologies that allowed WooCommerce Admin is Action Scheduler—the background job runner previously used in the WooCommerce core. The 3.1 version that has been included in the WooCommerce 4.0 is a unique, more performing version of Action Scheduler which uses custom tables, offering a great experience even on stores with large amounts of orders and posts in the database.

Ensuring a stable Action Scheduler in WooCommerce is significant, and more than 10,000 sites are already using it concurrently with the WooCommerce Subscriptions 3 plugin.

Unique onboarding experience

Starting an online store can be a bewildering and confusing experience, but with WooCommerce development services, things could be seamless. The new version and the right company can help you start your store that runs faster and with great ease. Many of you may feel an onboarding experience with WooCommerce 4.0.

Additional updates

Along with the new WooCommerce admin, you will find the following improvements in 4.0:

• Latest fixes of WooCommerce Blocks package
• Enhancement to the Order edit screen
• Updates related to Brexit and VAT
• Optimizations for Cash on delivery payment gateway and saving variations
• Improvements to email handling

Upgrading to 4.0

WooCommerce 4.0 is a fresh better version which as mentioned, is not fully backward compatible with prior WooCommerce versions. However, the breaking innovation that has been introduced is only on the database level of Action Scheduler and hence the woocommerce upgrade should run well for most customers.

You need to be aware of a few post-update database upgrade cycles that need to run after updating. On very large databases, running the upgrade routine with the WP CLI command wp WC update rather than the admin interface is better.

Upgrade WooCommerce

Click here

Deprecated functions and methods

• countries_using_vat has been replaced with WC_Countries::get_vat_countries

Template file changes in 4.0

In the below table, the updated template files have been mentioned:

We hope the above-mentioned features will update with the site changes and perform better in the agile market.