WooCommerce 3.0 named “Bionic Butterfly” has just been released. This version contains some major features such as updated product gallery, speed and performance improvements, addition of CRUD classes, CLI via REST API etc.
Overhauled Product gallery
There has been talk about the gallery experience on individual WooCommerce product pages. Finally the gallery has been revamped for better view on mobile devices and smaller screen sizes.
Gallery images can now be magnified or zoomed in from a lightbox popup. When there are multiple thumbnails images, clicking on one will simply update the current image instead of opening a new lightbox window. Other notable gallery updates include mobile gallery views, touch and swipe to scroll through the gallery, pinch to zoom and swipe up to close the current image.
When you zoom into a product image on mobile devices, it will display the actual size of the image instead of scaling to the browser window.
Speed & Performance Improvements
Performance is an important factor when you are running a large online store. With WooCommerce 3.0 your store can now be faster and more efficient.
Here are the two major performance improvements that were shipped with WooCommerce 3.0:
1. Use of taxonomies to determine and display product visibility, out of stock products and featured products. Previously this was being done via post meta which is slower.
2. Reduction of the number of queries for upsells and related products on WooCommerce product and cart pages.
Introduction to CRUD Classes
CRUD stands for Create, Read, Update and Delete. With the CRUD classes you can now modify orders, products, customers, line items, shipping zones, payment tokens, and coupons with less code. This allows you to define the data for each resource and control its flow and validation.
You just need to know the names of the data you are working with instead of its types and structure.
Overhauled Command Line Interface (CLI)
WooCommerce CLI is now powered by the REST API. This allows you to run more operations and reduce the amount of code you need for it. Currently these commands are now available with list, get, update, and create operations.
Some other minor improvements include,
1. Automatic sorting of tax rates to make it easier to add and manage new tax zones
2. Customers can now dismiss the sitewide notice.
3. Updates in WordPress networks/multisite user handling so that WooCommerce can add existing users to the current store if the user already has an account in the same network.
4. Merging of cart percent and product percent coupon types into one method
5. Improved logging option for developers
I hope you have enjoyed reading about the new WooCommerce 3.0. If you’ve already tried this version feel free to share your experience in the comments.