WooCommerce is an open-source, highly popular and widely used WordPress Plugin. With WooCommerce, as we all know, we can create our own e-commerce website without any hassle. And along with WooCommerce 4.0 release, it becomes much more efficient, easy and user-friendly experience.
This new version of WooCommerce has been in development since January 2020 and launched on 10th of March 2020. WooCommerce till now has 3500 commits with great efforts from 45 contributors, these contributors include official WooCommerce Team and some freelance contributors.
What’s New in WooCommerce 4.0?
Let’s take a glance at, what WooCommerce 4.0 has to offer:
- WooCommerce Admin Interface
- Action Scheduler 3.1
- New Shop Setup Experience
- Additional Updates
WooCommerce Admin Interface
WooCommerce 4.0 brings huge changes to the admin dashboard. The WC team completely changes the look and feel of their admin interface. From now on, you can organise your dashboard as you want, it gives your most important sales data at a glance. This admin interface for WooCommerce will provide you with better reporting facilities such as filtering, improved customer management and analytics, product comparisons etc. This update provides you with:
- Newly Designed Admin Dashboard
- Improved Reporting
- Notification and Emailing enhancements
- New Store Management Tools
One thing to consider and is also important that, the developer team clearly said that the old reports haven’t been removed for now and are deprecated temporarily but will be decommissioned in future with proper and enough notices to store owners and admins.
Action Scheduler 3.1
Action Scheduler is a part of WooCommerce from the core. This new version of Action Scheduler uses Custom Tables to store a large number of orders and posts in the database which will bring significant performance boosts. Action Scheduler is already being used by more than 10,000 sites, because why not?
It is a major release which means it will break backward compatibility with the previously installed version. In other words, WooCommerce 4.0 is not fully backward compatible with previous versions of WooCommerce. You should definitely consider upgrading and migrating to the latest version soon.
Some Additional Enhancements in Action Scheduler 3.1
- Async Queue Runner
- Context Parameter
- Bulk cancel by hook or group
- Fixes for Cron and Recurring action types
New Market Setup Experience
The major update also comes with the new WooCommerce Market setup experience. This new setup has now become easier, efficient, faster up and running.
Additional Updates
Some other enhancements and updates are as follows:
- Improved Order Edit screen
- Cash On Delivery system is now optimize
- Improved Email and Notifications handling/experience
- Fixes for WooCommerce Blocks package
- Some new hooks and fixes
Wrapping Up
That’s all from the WooCommerce 4.0 release, actually, that’s a lot if you say so. We will try to cover all updates along with additional features and functionalities that are being included in new releases.
Lastly, you should also keep in mind that you will need WordPress 5.3 in order to upgrade to WooCommerce 4.0. Now as we covered and summed up all the things related to this release, ping us back in the comments section below if you find any difficulty in upgrading or share some other features which are not listed here.
Interesting Reads: How To Set Up WooCommerce: A Step-By-Step Guide
