WooCommerce 3.5 was released this week. It’s a minor update that has been in development since May and began testing in September. The release should be backwards compatible to version 3.0 of the plugin but users are always advised to test all of their themes and extensions before updating.
Store owners can expect to see a change in the copy of the default transactional emails. They have been updated to be friendlier and more human. This is particularly important for the customer-facing emails. All of the following have been updated: on-hold, processing, completed, refunded both full and partially, invoice both with a pending and non-pending status, customer notes, password reset, new account. The default content in the store admin emails has also been improved.
The WooCommerce team anticipates that the updates to the transactional emails will reduce the need for store owners to customize their email templates. It also gives customers a better, friendlier connection to the store. More updates to the email content editing experience are planned for 2019.
Store owners may also benefit from the new option to set a low stock threshold in the inventory tab for individual products, export products by category to the CSV exporter, and define custom product placeholder images that will resize to correct store aspect ratio.
The WooCommerce REST API continues to evolve with v3 introduced in this release. It adds new endpoints required for the wc-admin feature plugin, the React-powered WooCommerce admin interface that was featured at last week’s WooSesh. REST API v3 also adds new features to existing endpoints while maintaining backwards compatibility with legacy API versions.
WooCommerce 3.5 introduces support for the Custom Product Tables feature plugin, which is being developed to improve store performance and scalability. In some cases storing product data in custom tables has brought 30% faster page loads.
In version 3.5 the “Preview Changes” button was removed from the publish meta box when editing products. If you’re missing it, Rémi Corson published a quick CSS snippet to bring it back.
Check out the release post for a full rundown of all the updates, deprecations, and template file changes in version 3.5.
Hmm…I wonder if Scott Bowler of ClassicPress will now choose to fork Woocommerce too as it becomes ever more dependent on WP v5, Gutenberg, React, etc.