Today I am excited to announce the availability of WooCommerce 2.0 beta 1. As you might have seen in our earlier post where we explained what was going to happen the next few months, WooCommerce 2.0 will be the next big release of our plugin.
Because WooCommerce 2.0 will introduce so many changes and new features, it is important to properly test all of this before releasing it. That’s why we are going through the full testing stages before releasing the final version. First stop is this beta release. This beta release should not be used on production websites as the software is still in development.
I can’t stress this enough: Do not use this version of WooCommerce, unless you know what you are doing. If you use this beta version on your production site, it is possible things will break. We do want to invite you to take this first beta for a test ride, help us make it a better plugin and that is what this post is all about.
What’s new in WooCommerce 2.0?
For WooCommerce 2.0 we have rewritten major parts of our code to give it a performance boost and remove all legacy code to make it future proof. This is also the reason why WooCommerce 2.0 will not be compatible with versions before WordPress 3.5. Larger stores will notice the speed increase in reports and when browsing through orders.
We have learned a lot from implementing WooCommerce in our own site, which we applied while developing WooCommerce 2.0. Next to those improvements, we have added a ton of new features to make it easier and more fun to manage your online stores.
To highlight a couple new features:
- New option to hold stock for unpaid orders. When the time limit is reached, and the order is not paid for, stock is released and the order is cancelled.
- New options for individual transaction emails with template editor, so it is easier to change the text of your emails.
- Added option to resend order emails, which has been requested a lot and is now finally becoming available.
- “On Sale”, “Best Selling†and “Top Rated†shortcodes have been added to showcase your top products.
To top all that off, we have been working with the Sucuri security team to make sure our code is checked and proven to be very secure.
The full changelog for WooCommerce 2.0 can be found on GitHub.
Testing and reporting bugs
↑ Back to topAll these new features are coming in the next release, but first we need to test everything. Test it again and again. Test it until we think it is ready for launch. We want your help with all this testing, so we can find and fix bugs even faster.
If you find any bugs, please let us know via a GitHub issue:
- Search the issues to see if the bug hasn’t been reported or fixed already.
- List what WooCommerce (beta-) version you are using.
- Explain the bug or issue you are reporting:
- What did you expect to see/do?
- What did you see, or what happened instead?
- What are the steps to reproduce your issue?
- Make sure to list as many details as you can to make our work in reproducing and fixing the issue as easy as possible.
- Try to list as many technical details regarding your hosting environment and setup, for example tell us what hosting platform you are using.
Important: Our WooCommerce extensions are not yet tested with this WooCommerce beta release. We will start doing that now beta 1 is released and plan to have most of them tested during the next couple weeks. Please do not report bugs with extensions in our GitHub repository, but stick to issues with the WooCommerce plugin only.
Don’t be afraid to report something that might not be a bug, we will not hurt you! It is better to report something that you think is a bug, so we can investigate or explain how it should work. If you are in doubt, let us know. We can’t fix bugs that we are not aware of.
What’s next?
Are you all excited for this next version and can’t wait to update your production websites to WooCommerce 2.0? Well, depending on how many bugs we find in this beta version, we might have to release another beta (or maybe even more). When we think the code is stable enough, we will release a release candidate (RC) version. If that version proves to be working fine, we are ready to release the final WooCommerce 2.0.
We are currently expecting to release the final version in January. 2013 is going to be a great WooCommerce year. Happy testing!
looks fantastic! we’re planning on using it even more extensively this year!
Hey John,
Awesome to see you over here on the site. I’m a personal fan of Mr. TentBlogger himself. 😉
Where are you guys going to put WooCommerce through it’s paces at? I’m sure we’d all be interested in seeing it. Speaking of that, I need to hop over to WP Daily and add it to Reeder!
This is a great news, thank you for giving us the opportunity to test WooCommerce 2.
All the best for 2013 to the Woo team.
I can vouch for the awesomeness behind WC 2.0. I have been using this since it was developed as 1.7.0 🙂
the amount of work already gone and going into this is unbelievable 🙂 the guys are always on top of the bug fixes so put them through and they will fix 🙂
Kudos for your work.
That’s awesome to hear, you did sneak through on 2.0 before it was even called 2.0!
Thanks for kicking the tires on this and helping us make it even better!
Sahweet…..
This are great news!,
I will miss an option to send emails from the order page direct to the customer,
Blessings!.
Already like the mentioned new features !! Keep up the good work ! And for my support: as from today i’m a woo-clubber !
Heyo! Welcome aboard!
What would be most awesome is if someone would code in the ability to use a product specific zipcode, and if there wasn’t one present, fallback to the zipcode defined in the WC settings.
I currently do mostly dropshipping, and having one zipcode makes handling shipping charges a nightmare.
Please add your ideas here.
Thanks!
Yea would be useful if they could integrate something like Zip Director (http://zipdirector.com) and/or add it as a Woocommerce plugin.
This way you can setup your whole shopping cart according to Zip Codes, with various fallback levels.
Looks like you misspelled Sucuri in the changelog. 🙂 I misspell their name all the time… Lmao
Awesome news guys, this looks great! I’ll give the beta a test once I finish up some other stuff I’m working on.
Thanks, I’ve just updated the Sucuri name in the changelog. 🙂
Cannt wait to see the best ever wp plugin v2 in action! Downloading…
Please bring in the ability to filter the orders page by product. Its so frustrating when you have a small bunch of products that get lots and lots of orders and you need to filter by product and you cant. Alot of stores need to see all the orders for a specific product so post those products with a specific courier. I would use woocommerce for sure if it had this function. Hopefully future releases will see it.
When you go to the sales by product report, you can already access the data you need:
wp-admin/admin.php?page=woocommerce_reports&tab=sales&chart=4
Here you enter a product you want to see the sales of, then you get a monthly overview of the amount and number of sales. Clicking on the month will bring you to the orders containing that product, in the month you’ve clicked on.
Thanks Coen, I see this now. I am guessing there is no way to export these specific orders per product or export the report. I really need this for giving to suppliers etc.
It would be nice to see the PDF invoice download that you guys have in the client account area also – almost every second customer asks me how do I download an invoice! this would be a blessing 🙂
+1
Guys, use the ideas board. Please.
Will do james, sorry about that – got excited at news of 2.0 😉
Here it is: http://ideas.woocommerce.com/forums/133476-woocommerce/suggestions/3480265-pdf-download-of-invoice-from-the-client-account-ar
V2.0 looks really good, but still waiting for one big feature that should be apart of any ecommerce shop, “Sell by Brands”. I know there is an extension for this, but it should never have been an extension. The code belongs in the core. Every ecommerce site I visit has a shop by brand, yet WooCommerce is still missing this function. Not sure why?
I think to say it “should be apart of any ecommerce shop” is hyperbole.
More than 50% of the WooCommerce sites I see on a daily basis are run by small businesses, selling their own products. They would have no use for the brand functionality our extension provides whatsoever. That’s why we chose to make it an extension.
WooCommerce caters to the majority. If you need more advanced/niche functionality you add it via extension(s).
Thanks for the reply, but I’m standing by the fact that brand or manufacture labeling is part of a shop, big or small and not just WooCommerce shops either.
As for the extension, it was a good idea, just should be in the core. Maybe by V3.0.
I’ll still continue to support WooCommerce and push it when I can.
Why would you need to list brands if you’re only selling your own products? Or if you’re a franchise selling a single manufacturers products? Or if you’re selling Art, or Music… the list goes on…
It wont ever be a feature of core so if you need the functionality, I’d suggest you just purchase the extension now to avoid disappointment in the long run :p
I’ve got the extension because I’m in the minority on this. It was a great idea on the ideas board and it got lots of votes so I know I’m not the only one that wanted it.
I sell about 10-20 different brands depending on the market.
Good talking with you on this.
cheers
I’m both happy to hear about 2.0 version but in the same time dissapointed as well. Woo team knows that there are more critical issues need to be hotfixed (like sku bug in variable product) but ask current user to “watch” version 2.0.
which bug is this ant?
Will definitely give it a try, cheers!
I’m currently having a website developed. Will it be an easy upgrade to 2.0 from the current version?
Yes – we’ll have migration scripts to easily update from WC 1.6.x -> WC 2.0.
OK,
I have it running for test here http://webdomitia.fr/woocommerce2beta/
I will test it and report eventual bugs.
All the best
Dig in and enjoy!
I would really like to see greater multi-currency support.
The store manager should be able to custom set a price in different currencies for each product. The user should then be charged a particular price depending on where they are shipping to.
So essentially for each product you can set the price for each country. This would provide for much better control than having prices automatically converted or letting buyers from one country pay the price customers pay in another country.
Many larger companies charge customers this way online (eg; Apple), so I think for WooCommerce going forward it really needs to handle this better. Perhaps through an extension.
Yes, this is something that we are aware of and I do think that it should be an extension. Only a small group of people using WooCommerce would need it and therefore it doesn’t belong in the WooCommerce core.
We were thinking about developing this. Email us if you are interested in pooling together. Ta.
Before rolling your own and possibly duplicating existing work, I’d like to ask what’s wrong with WPML and WooCommerce Multilingual?
They don’t have anything to do with the kind of functionality I mentioned above…?
I wouldn’t go as far as saying “anything”. WCML in fact does offer multi-currency functionality. With my last project I went separate MU subsites route for different countries, so I didn’t get to work through WCML’s approach yet. But there *is* something there, so perhaps it would make sense to build upon it?
Excited to see the full release of this and can’t wait to a have a go implementing on some client sites! It’s great that your continuing to put so much work in to such an already amazing, free WordPress plugin.
Hello,
I’m looking for a way to list products by list view (not grid view) on all pages without using a plugin. Even with a plugin ( http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/woocommerce-grid-list-toggle/ ) the list view on pages does not appear when using short codes. This is used for a site that sells services and not ‘products’ that require thumbnail views. I’ve moved from Shopp plugin to WC and discovered that WC does not have product list view by default (?). Any suggestions? Thank you.
That plugin will only work on the shop or product archive pages.
If you want list view only you’ll just need to modify your css and hook the excerpt in. Post on the wordpress.org forum for further assistance.
Did selecting variations by radio buttons make it in? Looked in the changelog but didn’t see it.
Hey guys –
Strong work in getting all of these new features into 2.0! I really like that you are taking security so seriously. Any changes to reporting planned? There are a number of reports we could really use that are not in there. A small thing, but the x axis never has a data label… For example when an orders report is run across a certain date range the dates are not listed. It would be great to always have labeling on the x axis. Poor x axis is not feeling loved 😉
As you can see in the readme file that I linked to in this post, we have added a couple reports. We are always keen to add new ones, or at least explain how to create your own reports. Please let us know what you need added.
The order label might be a bug, or something we can change. Please report it as a GitHub issue.
Hay guys a few feature suggestions I think you must add,
– Display estimated delivery time (every eCommerce site must have this)
– If you select only one country for delivery option it should not show it in a drop down menu.
– An option to customize the checkout page fields.
Will be reporting on bugs as I find them but I think the new release will be incomplete without the above features.
WooCommerce will never be ‘complete’ 😉
At least add a field on product page so the admin can set the estimate delivery on every product.
Just add it to the description?
Or add your own custom field.
WohooooooooooooOO!!!
Best christmas gift ever! Trying to start a shop with your plugin atm but have problems with the email templates.
;D
This will become much easier in january ;D
Thanks.
Have a nice holiday.
can i upgrade my WC 1.6 demo site to WC 2.0 to test?
Yes you can, as long as you do not use it on a live website. Make sure you hit the ‘Update’ button after you activate the new WooCommerce version. So please deactivate 1.6.x, then replace the files with 2.0 beta 1 and then activate WooCommerce again so the update procedure is properly started.
Ok! Let’s test it and see how it is! I’ll see as well the spanish translation.
Find and book hotel rooms online at Super 8. Browse discounts, deals, photos and amenities including free breakfast and internet. Save more with Wyndham
Hi,
I see that for some reason that the “sort by” section is always at the bottom of the page? Is there a way to have it at the top AND bottom so people don’t have to scroll to the end of the page with the products to be able to sort it?
It’s been moved to the top in 2.0.
Much will change, how to create themes and extensions, with this new version ?
Is extension compatibility *guaranteed* ? I’m working on 2 sites now that makes extensive use of extensions that I bought during your recent sales and it would be a shame if they don’t work with WC 2.0
We’ll be testing all extensions as thoroughly as we can.
Never just upgrade without testing though as we will not guarantee compatibility.
Set yourself up with a staging version of your site for testing things like this. Will save you a whole load of potential hassle now and in the future.
How do I know if an extension works with the old vs. or the new vs?
Does this mean for a short time there may be 2 vs. of all extensions that are not compatible?
btw
where is the proper place to report problems with extensions, anything public that I can browse for solutions?
Compatibility will be listed in the changelogs.
Report all issues in our support desk.
Hi,
WC 2 seems promising but still I don’t see a reliable and complete import/export system, that manages products and variations, like any serious e-commerce system provides.
Will this be added in this release?
Thanks
Mac
Never seen this?
Does this release fix the issue with variation prices not being aggregated for Google rich snippets?
New layered nav current filters widget. This lists active filters from all layered nav for de-selection.
This is a gem.
Thanks
Mark