WooCommerce 2.5

WooCommerce version 2.5 has landed 3 days ago. To make the update process as smooth as possible, make a backup, update your extensions, view the official update guide, and then update WooCommerce in a sandbox or on your local development environment first.

WooCommerce 2.5 “Dashing Dolphin” has been in development for ~5 months and has seen around 1600 commits from 42 contributors. This is another evolutionary release which focusses on improvements to existing functionality, as well as stability and performance. There are however some new features to mention in 2.5 which developers in particular should enjoy using.

Being a fan of WP CLI (command line interface), one of my favorite features in this new major release is the WooCommerce CLI lets you perform many actions on your store via the command line, such as creating customers and coupons. This is very useful for power users. Here is a quick example of the CLI in action, in this example updating then deleting a coupon.

Here’s a list of other improvements and new features:

• A new sessions table
• Performance improvements
• Tax rate settings UI
• Improved checkout flow

As always more info can be found in the changelog.

Since November 9th 2015 there were 3 beta versions and 2 release candidates giving ample warning to developers to test, including posts on Twitter, Facebook, and our dev blog.

The beta tester plugin is installed on around ~60 sites according to .org, but this number does not include manual installs from Github. According to Github API, RC1 was downloaded manually over 100 times, so it’s good to see people testing things out.

Internally the WooCommerce team has been testing the RC on some new stores they’re building for WooConf, on WPJobManager.com, and on WooThemes.com. They have also tested all WooThemes extensions for compatibility, and had their 3rd party devs do the same.