WooCommerce 4.5

Today, WooCommerce announced that version 4.5 of the most popular WordPress ecommerce plugin is publicly available. It has been in development since August 2020 and the core has been updated with about 643 commits from 25 contributors.

This is a minor release, which means everything is backward compatible with the previous version.

This release is relatively small compared to recent WooCommerce releases, and is being released with a focus on stability and compatibility. WooCommerce is currently improving their testing processes based on learnings from recent releases, 4.4 in particular. These changes will allow WooCommerce to return to their normal release size, and ensure that they are providing a reliable, stable product with each release.

As always, it is recommended to create a backup of your site and making sure that themes and plugins are compatible before updating. You can check out this update guide for more information.

What’s New in 4.5? The WooCommerce 4.5 release contains primarily fixes and improvements.

New Onboarding Guide

When you first visit your WooCommerce home screen, you’ll now see a guided tour that provides more information about the home screen.

REST API

This release merges the REST API, which was previously a separate repository, back into WooCommerce Core. Any issues with the REST API should now be logged to the Core WooCommerce repository.

Filters

We have added new filters:

Filters	Description
woocommerce_cart_product_cannot_add_another_message	Filters message about more than 1 product being added to cart.
woocommerce_cart_product_out_of_stock_message	Filters message about a product being out of stock.
woocommerce_cart_product_not_enough_stock_message	Filters message about a product not having enough stock.
woocommerce_file_download_method	Filter download method.
woocommerce_query_for_reserved_stock	Allows filtering of the query for getting reserved stock of a product.

Notable fixes and improvements

There are many fixes and stability improvements in this release, including

1. When you have “hide shipping costs until an address is entered”, the shipping cost is now hidden until the complete address is entered. This fixes an issue where previously shipping costs were displayed prior to the complete address being entered.
2. If you cancel a pending order, coupon holds for that order are now released. This fixes an issue where cancelling a PayPal checkout caused the coupons that were in the cart to become invalid because they were used in a previous canceled order.
3. When manually creating orders, searches for variations will now fallback to the parent SKU if a child SKU is not specified.
4. Coupon codes are now always stored with HTML entities encoded. This increases security by ensuring that we don’t store unfiltered input. There is a database migration in place when 4.5 is installed, so this is a non-breaking change.

WooCommerce also made some changes to address issues with the filter by attribute widget when used with variable products in this release, but they recognize that it still may not work as expected. They’re tracking the issues with the widget and welcome you follow along there as they work toward fixing this in the next release.

Database Changes

This release does not require any core database alteration. However, the 4.3 release did introduce a new table, so if you are upgrading from an earlier release than 4.3, make sure that WordPress user has permission to add a new table to the database.

A re-occurring worker will be scheduled after update to update coupon codes such that HTML entities are properly encoded. This will be done in batches of 10 and is backward compatible.

Minimum WordPress Requirement

While this release does not change the minimum PHP version, it does increase the minimum WordPress version to 5.3. Remember that you can read all about the new WordPress support policy in the developer blog post detailing it.

Picture courtesy of Vivek Doshi.