WooCommerce 2.5 – Dashing Dolphin

It is only a few hours since the people at WooCommerce published the latest version of their e-commerce plugin for WordPress.

WooCommerce 2.5 – Dashing Dolphin, which can be translated as the dashing dolphin, is said by its authors to be the fastest version of WooCommerce published to date, although at APG we have not noticed any great changes so far.

Most of the changes in this new version have taken place at code level, so there are hardly any noticeable new features at user or customer level; even so, let us look at the new features this new version of WooCommerce brings with it.

New features

In the WooCommerce Settings we find a couple of noticeable new features.

The first of them has to do with the management of WooCommerce emails, since the tabs that existed up to version 2.4.13 have been removed and all the emails managed by whichever part of the WooCommerce ecosystem you have active have been brought together in a single table that is far simpler to manage visually, just as you can see in the screenshot accompanying this paragraph. For the rest, email management is exactly the same as until now. It is worth pointing out that a new email notification has been created for the administrator for those orders or payments that turn out to have failed.

On the other hand the Tax settings table has been improved by adding a search box and saving changes on the fly through AJAX.

As for the customer side, we will see that a total of 13 files of the original WooCommerce template have changed slightly, most of them with changes that are practically unnoticeable to the user:

1. single-product/review.php.
2. single-product/add-to-cart/variable.php.
3. order/order-details.php.
4. order/order-details-item.php.
5. loop/add-to-cart.php.
6. global/quantity-input.php.
7. content-widget-product.php.
8. content-product.php.
9. content-product_cat.php.
10. checkout/payment.php.
11. checkout/form-pay.php.
12. cart/mini-cart.php.
13. cart/cart-shipping.php.

In addition, up to 7 new files have been created:

1. single-product/add-to-cart/variation.php.
2. single-product/add-to-cart/variation-add-to-cart-button.php.
3. emails/email-customer-details.php.
4. emails/plain/email-customer-details.php.
5. emails/admin-failed-order.php.
6. product-searchform.php.
7. checkout/terms.php.

It is on the order completion page, the checkout, where we can see most of these small changes:

• Some components have been moved, such as the link to the General Terms and Conditions of purchase, now before the order button.
• A password strength indicator has been added when new customer accounts are created.

Internally a new table has been created in the database to manage sessions. This new method, based on the WP Session Manager plugin, is far more efficient and cleaner since, at last, the wp_options table will not fill up with thousands of WooCommerce session records that make this table reach really colossal sizes. The use that was being made of transients until now has also been reviewed in order to remove everything that was not necessary, the cache system has been improved, and the SQL queries have been speeded up to reduce the use of the wp_options table, which comes back to what we said at the start of this entry, that WooCommerce 2.5 is the fastest version published to date.

Lastly, a novel CLI has been added which they have called WP CLI, through which you will be able to run a great many actions from the command console with an SSH connection to your web server. You can see it in action in this animated GIF:

There are also some changes in the REST API, since some new functions have been added.

There are many more small improvements and fixes; if you want to see the full list, you can do so here.

All in all, WooCommerce 2.5 has been a great bet on improving the performance of this fantastic WordPress plugin. What is more, it has been published without any apparent or important bug; in fact it is the first time, given what the latest published versions of WooCommerce have accustomed us to, that urgent updates have not had to be published to fix various bugs appearing in the first hours of use.

Our recommendation is that you update as soon as possible.