Make Your Store Faster and More Flexible with WooCommerce 3.7

Escrito por Brent MacKinnon on agosto 15, 2019 Blog.

We are pleased to announce that WooCommerce 3.7 has been released!

Similar to our previous release back in April, WooCommerce 3.7 focuses on performance improvements while adding new WooCommerce Product Blocks and enhancing existing ones. This update also increases the PHP and WordPress minimum version requirements to optimize your store’s performance and security – more on that shortly.

After extensive testing with popular extensions and themes on multiple hosts, our dedicated team deployed managed updates for several real-life customers on staging sites. Finally, we ran the 3.7 release candidate in production on Woo.com before public release.

What’s new in 3.7?

WooCommerce 3.7 is a minor release, our second for 2019 as we work towards smaller, more frequent updates. This means that it should be fully backwards compatible with all WooCommerce releases since 3.0.

As always, we highly recommend you follow best practices and back up your site before updating WooCommerce via WP Admin.

Here’s a taste of what’s new:

WooCommerce Product Blocks

We’re excited to include several new and improved WooCommerce Product Blocks – our eCommerce-focused blocks for the powerful block-based editor that’s been part of WordPress since 5.0.

New Focal Point picker on Featured Product block
New Focal Point picker on the Featured Product block

Product Blocks allow store builders to easily feature products on posts and pages, combining content with commerce.

Improvements and additions include:

  • Better block branding for easier discoverability.
  • A new Focal Point Picker for the Featured Product block.
  • A new Product Categories List block.
  • A new Featured Category Block, enabling you to feature a category and show a link to its archive.
  • A new Products by Tag(s) block.
  • Searching for products in the Featured Product and Hand-Picked Product blocks is now faster – woo!

Read more about the new WooCommerce Product Blocks.

In order to access these new blocks, you’ll either need to have WordPress 5.1+ or the latest version of the Gutenberg Editor plugin installed.

Performance Improvements

This release boasts several changes under the hood – such as speeding up pages where comment data is retrieved (e.g. product reviews, post comments, and admin pages). These improvements ensure that WooCommerce is now faster than ever.

New PHP and WordPress minimum requirements

WooCommerce 3.7 also bumps the minimum supported version of PHP up to 5.6. This is not only for security reasons, but to take advantage of available features and functionality, and offer the best experience for stores. Stores are also faster and more secure when running the latest version of PHP. 

We also increased the minimum required WordPress version to 4.9 – this will likely increase to WordPress 5.0 in the not too distant future.

Upgrade nudges have been added to WooCommerce 3.6.5, pointing users to documentation to determine whether they have the latest and greatest versions. Stores running older versions of PHP and WordPress will not be able to update to WooCommerce 3.7 before upgrading to the minimum supported versions.

Additional enhancements

There are several other tweaks, fixes, and improvements in this release, including the ability to customize  the “Thank You” wording in emails via an additional content field, and new coupon code generator functionality. Learn more by viewing the full changelog on GitHub.

Ready for WooCommerce 3.7?

Before you dive in and get started, we recommend reviewing our documentation around how to update, ensuring that backups are in place, and then installing the update via WP Admin.

We’re here if you need us, but please note that we’re not able to diagnose or solve potential issues via blog comments. The best – and fastest – way to get in touch with us is by using the methods listed below:

If you’d like more technical details about this release, read a longer version of this update in our post on the developer blog.

WooCommerce 3.7 was released August 12th. Update today and let us know what you think in the comments!

Protect your store and your customers with Jetpack

15 Responses

  1. wassem mansour
    agosto 19, 2019 at 4:37 pm #

    Thanks for the great effort ti bring us the best
    I hope you do more regarding speed in both front-end and admin panel. Good luck

  2. Nimitz
    agosto 19, 2019 at 6:24 pm #

    This is really great, I have to test it out first before I update my client sites. Looking forward to the rest of the updates.

    • Sovan
      agosto 20, 2019 at 4:00 pm #

      Thank you for releasing a woocommerce update. There was no problem after my online shop was updated to Woocommerce 3.7

  3. Darrell
    agosto 19, 2019 at 6:40 pm #

    Awesome update. We can’t wait to test some of these new features on our client sites. Keep up the good work team!

  4. John Mounsey
    agosto 19, 2019 at 7:51 pm #

    Safely upgraded to 3.7 and no issues to report here as of yet! (I’m running PHP 7.2 and WordPress 5.2.2.).

  5. Edwin Hamers
    agosto 19, 2019 at 8:00 pm #

    Brent

    How does the woocommerce blocks relate to the seperate woocommerce block plugin ?

    https://wordpress.org/plugins/woo-gutenberg-products-block/

    • brentmackinnon
      agosto 21, 2019 at 3:33 pm #

      They’re the same! The separate blocks feature plugin that you’ve referenced has been included in WooCommerce Core as part of WC 3.7.

      WooCommerce 3.7 ships with Product Blocks 2.3 for the WordPress Block Editor which contains numerous enhancements and performance improvements since the introduction of Product Blocks in 3.6.

      • Edwin Hamers
        agosto 21, 2019 at 4:49 pm #

        I would have never guessed, although it makes sense. Maybe an dismissible alert should be displayed when the block plugin is activated while having Woo 3.7 ?
        I like to have as little as possible plugins!

  6. mike ahuja
    agosto 20, 2019 at 6:44 am #

    thank you for the information, although my person woo store doesnt have many items yet, its motivating me to expand more….an informative post most def..

  7. Muhammad Noer
    agosto 22, 2019 at 3:20 am #

    Thank you for for updating WooCommerce. Will upgrade my shop to new version!

  8. Eddie
    agosto 22, 2019 at 6:41 pm #

    This is my first time to post a quesiton and not sure where actually to post, so I will start here. I have two product classes because each has different shipping costs. When you check out it gives the the buyer the option to choose. How can one make the computations in the classes do the work and not allow the buyer to override at checkout? Do I need an upgrade to a different plugin? Thanks.

  9. Thulani Matshoba
    agosto 29, 2019 at 10:44 am #

    Thank you for the update ya’ll, updated to PHP 7.2 && WordPress 5.2.2 and now i just upgraded to Woocommerce 3.7… no issues yet 🙂

  10. Nicole
    agosto 30, 2019 at 7:35 pm #

    Where can I check to see if all of my add-ons are compatible with the new version? I found it once, and 6 of them weren’t but I would like to check again.
    Thx in advance

  11. istique ahmed
    setembro 5, 2019 at 2:58 am #

    Hi, after updating woocommerce i am having a problem. When i click on the product image thumbnail http://prnt.sc/p1yj8l, rather opening in lightbox/image galary it opens as only an image http://prnt.sc/p1yjxi. I have tried everything to solve it but failed.
    The image should be on the preview(1) https://prnt.sc/p1yk59
    Can get anyone’s help here?

    • Gareth Allison
      setembro 12, 2019 at 5:18 pm #

      Hi there Istique,

      Sorry to hear you’ve run into some difficulties – that must be frustrating. If you’re already a WooCommerce.com customer, the best way to get help is to submit a support ticket over at https://woo.com/contact-us/ and our helpful team of Happiness Engineers will be able to assist.

      If you’re only using the free core version of WooCommerce, you can post in the official support forum at https://wordpress.org/support/plugin/woocommerce/

      Hope this helps.