WooCommerce 3.3 Removed From Plugin Directory Due to Theme Conflicts

Earlier this week, WooCommerce 3.3 was released and among the features was increased theme compatibility. However, soon after release, users of third-party themes reported issues with categories displaying improperly.

Despite it being a minor release that should be fully backwards compatible with previous releases up to 3.0, WooCommerce has removed 3.3 from the plugin directory and replaced it with 3.2.6.

According to a post on the project’s official blog, WooCommerce 3.3.1 will take the place of 3.3 and will include a fix for the category display issue.

The issue affected themes with template overrides from 3.2.x which hadn’t been made compatible with 3.3. In general, we recommend that themes use hooks instead of template overrides. Themes such as Storefront (which does not use template overrides) were compatible at launch.

WooCommerce Blog

If you’ve already updated to WooCommerce 3.3 and your theme is compatible, you don’t need to make any changes. If your theme is not compatible, WooCommerce recommends checking with your theme’s author to see if a compatibility fix has been released.

Users can also wait for the release of 3.3.1, update to the pre-release version of 3.3.1, or use the WP-Rollback plugin and revert back to 3.2.6. WooCommerce developers suggest only going the WP-Rollback route if you’re not comfortable installing pre-release software.

Coen Jacobs, a former member of the WooCommerce development team, commented on Twitter that this was the first time he can remember that a release was reverted.

Fun fact: As far as I recall, there has never been a release of WooCommerce that has been withdrawn before. During my time on the development team we have pushed fix releases on the same day as a big releases, but never was it reverted like this.

— Coen Jacobs (@CoenJacobs) January 31, 2018

The development team has tested 3.3.1 with more than 40 different themes and believe it is stable. However, they are exercising caution and thoroughly testing the fixes with more themes. Users can expect to see 3.3.1 officially released the week of February 5th.