WooCommerce 2.6 Zipping Zebra

After 5 months of development a new major version of WooCommerce code named «Zipping Zebra» was released on Wednesday with over 1700 commits from 25 contributors.

The major focus for version 2.6 was on APIs, shipping and account pages, which ticks some items off of the WooCommerce 2016 core wishlist.

Shipping Zones

Shipping Zones are groups of locations to which you ship products. You can group multiple continents, countries, states, and zip codes into a ‘zone’ and then add shipping methods to each. Here’s a more detailed post about shipping zones.

WooCommerce REST API

A new WooCommerce REST API based on the WordPress REST API was released. This means WooCommerce now uses the WP REST API scaffolding layer and follows the same standards meaning it can be extended by plugins to add new data points or authentication methods.

The new API supports orders, customers, products, coupons, taxes, reports, and webhooks, both individually and in batches. This will be extended with additional endpoints in 2.7.

The REST API docs have been updated for the new API.

Previous versions of the API (v1, v2, and v3) are still present in core and will continue to function as normal. Here you can read more about the new API.

Account Pages

Older versions of WooCommerce had a single account page which listed all data; orders, downloads, saved cards etc. This was not very organised and could grow with extensions.

To fix this, a new endpoint/tab based account page was built with sections you can navigate through. Here you can read more about the new account page.

AJAX Cart Page

The cart page operations now use AJAX (updating item quantities, removing cart items, applying coupons, and updating shipping options). Here’s more to read about the AJAX cart.

There have been lots of tweaks and smaller changes since 2.5, so the best place to look at these would be in the changelog and for adventurous developers, the comparison on Github.

Upgrading to 2.6

Some notes for users and developers upgrading to 2.6. Aside from ensuring your extensions and theme are compatible and you’ve made backups:

1. You’ll need to be running WordPress 4.4 or above – the minimum requirement has been bumped.
2. If you’re running table rate shipping or flat rate box shipping authored by WooThemes, ensure you’re running the latest versions and the WooCommerce 2.6 data update will migrate any existing rates and zones.
3. If you’re using Simplify Commerce by MasterCard (payment gateway) you’ll be prompted to install the new version from WordPress.org as it is now a separate plugin and deprecated in WC core.
4. The data upgrader prompt will run updates in the background. If your site is not accessible or password protected there may be a delay for the cron-based fallback to run.

(All of these details have been first posted on woocommerce.wordpress.com. This post’s main picture is courtesy of Pexels).