The new WooCommerce 2.3 is here!

WooCommerce 2.3 – Handsome Hippo

Barely a few minutes ago the new version of WooCommerce was released, the fantastic WordPress plugin that turns our website into a complete online shop, specifically version 2.3, and after installing and testing it we can already give you our first impressions. By the way, they have called this new version Handsome Hippo, something like a handsome hippopotamus.

The first thing we can confirm is that our WooCommerce plugins: WC - APG Weight Shipping, WC - APG Free Shipping and WC - APG SMS Notifications, work 100% with no problem of any kind detected on WooCommerce 2.3.

The second thing we can also confirm is that it does not bring major code changes that force us to update our theme, as happened with the release of WooCommerce 2.1, which forced us to rewrite the PHP code of our WooCommerce plugins and caused us serious headaches with the source code of the templates.

WooCommerce 2.3

What we have found are slight modifications in the Settings of WooCommerce 2.3, mainly in the Products tab, which has now been divided into four sections instead of the current two.

A new tab called Webhooks can also be seen; they have even brought out some very good documentation about this new feature, although in reality it is not new, it already existed in version 2.2; what has happened is that they have now added the graphical interface in Settings, which is why we are devoting these lines to it. Its purpose is to add a notification of an event to a specific URL, very useful for notifying an external application of the creation of a new order, for example.

WooCommerce 2.3 – Webhooks

Although the documentation described in the link explains very well what a Webhoook is and how it is created, basically we need to know that all that is needed is to give it a specific name, a status, the event we want to “capture”, the URL where we are going to notify it and the secret key that will serve to generate the hash, although we can also omit it so that the Consumer Secret of the WooCommerce REST API is used.

The truth is that this new WooCommerce 2.3 comes loaded with small improvements both at the level of the administration panel and of the customer; many of them are almost imperceptible, but they make things much simpler for us. For example there is a new button in the orders that allows us to see more orders from a particular customer, or in the orders listed in My account links now appear in the products ordered, which makes it simpler to add them again to a new order, for example.

Another of the new features is the new design of the WooCommerce template, the one used by default in those themes that do not have a specific design for WooCommerce, leaving it simpler and more neutral, as well as the email template, which has also been revamped.

At customer level it also brings some more new features such as:

• The shopping cart widget now allows products to be removed from the order.
• The shopping cart has changed slightly too, since the buttons to calculate the shipping cost and to go to the checkout have been moved, as well as a new Undo button when a product is removed from the shopping cart.
• The +/- buttons for the quantities have disappeared, since the text boxes have become numeric and show some new buttons specific to this type of element. Even so they can be restored with this new plugin: WooCommerce Quantity Increment.

They have implemented support for some features of Jetpack by WordPress.com, such as Publicize, Omnisearch and Markdown, which is very practical for those of us who use it.

As you can see there are many new features, and this is no more than a small list of many other improvements we have detected, so we can tell you that the update is more than advisable, but, should we update now?, the answer is simple, no. After the madness of version releases in barely hours with the first versions of WooCommerce 2.2, where we did not recommend you to update until version 2.2.3 was released, for the time being we ask you for patience. We will give you the starting signal when we see that, indeed, as it has seemed to us so far, we do not detect any kind of problem.

Stay tuned for the next posts!