What’s new in WooCommerce 3.4: GDPR features and GeoLite2 integration

Since our last minor release in January, we’ve been working on a variety of improvements to WooCommerce:

• GDPR compliance tools and settings
• GeoLite2 integration

To ensure this update is stable, we’ve been doing plenty of testing and QA on our side including a public beta period, unit and integration testing, compatibility testing with our extensions and popular premium themes, working with customers to do managed updates, and running 3.4 on WooCommerce.com.

WooCommerce 3.4 is a minor release, meaning it should be fully backwards compatible with all WooCommerce releases since 3.0. However, it’s still considered best practice, and recommended, to backup before updating.

Here are some more details about what’s new in 3.4

We’ve done a lot of work getting WooCommerce ready for GDPR, and this release includes tools to help you ensure compliance:

• User data export, erasure, and anonymization tools.
• Settings for enabling automatic data cleanup or removal.
• New Customizer settings for checkout fields and policy notices on the Checkout page.
• Tweaks to logging to ensure personal data does not get logged.

You can read a detailed breakdown and explanation of all the GDPR compliance features, settings, and changes on our dev blog. If you’re unfamiliar with GDPR requirements and WooCommerce you can read our series of blog posts about getting ready for GDPR.

The GeoLite geolocation database WooCommerce uses to automatically populate the country during checkout has been discontinued and deprecated by the company that maintains it. We have integrated WooCommerce with its successor: GeoLite2. After upgrading WooCommerce you will be smoothly and automatically switched to the new geolocation database, and geolocation should continue to work properly for the foreseeable future.

The GeoLite2 integration requires a minimum PHP version of 5.4. As a necessary step WooCommerce will not support geolocation using GeoLite2 on PHP versions less than 5.4.

On sites running those old PHP versions geolocation will be done via APIs. The API-based geolocation is a slower method, and it is recommended you update your PHP version if you are running a version less than 5.4.

If you need help upgrading your PHP version, here is our handy guide.

But wait, there’s more!

• A multisite dashboard widget that shows order information from across all sites.

• Wildcard email support for coupon restrictions. Using the wildcard character you can set up coupons restricted to groups of similar email addresses (.edu email accounts, corporate email accounts from a certain business, etc.).

• Users can now set their display name on the My Account page.

• Improvements to the admin product search, including the ability to search for multiple products in the same query.

• Moved all photoswipe styles to their own CSS file to make them easy to dequeue if needed.
• The ability to declare a custom data sanitization callback in the settings API.
• Added support for additional HTML5 input types for settings and checkout forms.
• Many new filters and actions to increase the customizability of WooCommerce.

For a more complete list of new things, see the changelog.

You should also read the development blog to see what templates and functions have changed in WooCommerce 3.4.

Ready to give WooCommerce 3.4 a shot? Review our documentation about how to update, make sure backups are in place, and then grab the update in WP Admin.

If you’re craving more technical details about this update, you can read our post on the developer blog.

What do you think of our latest release? Let us know in the comments!

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Claudiu Lodromanean