WooCommerce 3.5

The new major version of WooCommerce, which was released on October 23, brings new features for an improved WooCommerce experience for shop owners and developers. In this article, all the major new features will be outlined to give you an overview of the update. WooCommerce 3.5 is backward compatible, therefore an update should cause no major issues. It is still recommended to create a backup of your existing site. On very large databases WooCommerce recommends running the upgrade routine with the WP CLI command wp wc update instead of through the admin interface.

The new REST API version 3

In the updated version new API endpoints are available, here an overview:

• A reviews endpoint to list, get, create, and update product reviews.
• Date fields are now editable on the products endpoint and have been updated to work with the “on backorder” stock status.
• New reports endpoints to get total counts of orders, products, customers, coupons, and reviews.
• Automatic total calculations when applying/removing coupons in the orders endpoint.
• New data endpoints to fetch Continents, Countries, and Currencies.
• Refund line items through the API.
• Query sort products by price, popularity and rating.
• Query products and variations by stock_status.
• Ability to batch update settings.

You can visit woocommerce.github.io to learn how to use the API and to see a complete specification of all API endpoints.

Improved transactional emails

This update improves the default wording of the WooCommerce transactional emails, which has not been changed for years, to make them less robotic. It reduces the need for custom email templates and will improve the customer experience. More and better WooCommerce email features will be added in 2019.

New features for shop owners

The shop owner can profit from the new features:

• They can now export products by category in the CSV exporter.
• They can now set a low-stock threshold for individual products.
• The payment method settings page has improved accessibility.

New features for shop developers

On top of a large amount of fixes and minor tweaks in this update, the developers can provfit by these new features:

• The Action Scheduler library used by the WooCommerce Subscriptions plugin and other WooCommerce plugins is now included in WooCommerce core. It provides a robust, scalable background processing solution for developers. In 3.5 webhooks will be delivered using this library.
• Support for the Custom Product Tables features plugin. We’re working on custom database tables to store product data and improve the performance and scalability of WooCommerce. This release adds the hooks and filters required by the feature plugin. Read more about this here.
• Support for the wc-admin feature plugin. We’re working on a modernization of the WooCommerce admin experience. This release adds the API endpoints required by the feature plugin. Read more about this here.
• Many new filters and actions to increase the customizability of WooCommerce.

Remeber to always backup before installing updates!