But… it’s only a minor release!
I was a little excited this morning to see the release of Woocommerce 5.0, and a little nervous – a major update means we need to make sure everything works after the update before pushing to a live site.
With a big workload on the Blue Kelpie desks and time running short it looked like we would have a lot of work on our hands! A bit of a relief to know that the move to 5.0 is a departure from the Semantic Versioning Schema (SemVer) and the adoption of the WordPress versioning schema.
Don’t worry too much about the details there, the result is this is a minor release, and as such, is fully backwards compatible. In fact all sites we’ve updated on so far today have experienced no issues whatsoever. Phew!
So, what’s new?
- Product review count fix from last update has been patched to now count old and new reviews.
- With the improved Analytics tab having all the good stuff you need for getting stats on your sales the legacy reports have now been deprecated.
- We really like this one: prefixed CSS variables are now in action. To test this: “Add
h1 {color: var(--wc-green) !important;}to your stylesheet to see the h1 header be the WooComms green colour.” - Items restored from the trash (i.e. products, orders or coupons) will restore with the same publish status – they were previously restoring as drafts.
- Changing a product type from simple to variable or vice versa no longer breaks any attachment file permissions, if that product had downloadable file(s) attached.
There have also been a few changes to some dev functions like allowing order emails to be resent to admins. Another change is to variable subscription products, they will no longer delete all variations when changing to a variable product. Changing to non-variable will delete variations.
All up this is a minor release to a major release number, but now inline with WordPress versioning schema. There are a few small things that have been improved but all is backwards compatible so you shouldn’t have too many issues but with plugins when you update. That said, always update to a staging environment first to see if you have any plugins that will break from the update.
Happy Woocommerce 5 day!
