Announcing theme compatibility with WooCommerce 4.0
A couple of days ago Automattic has released WooCommerce 4.0, the latest update of its very popular eCommerce plugin for WordPress. WooCommerce 4.0 has been in development from January 2020 but brings along changes worked on for more than two years. The main features are, inclusion of WordPress Admin in the plugin, action scheduler 3.1 and a new on boarding experience. Let’s take a closer look.
WooCommerce 4.0 is the first major release of 2020 which means that it is not fully backwards compatible with earlier versions. It is recommended to test the update on a staging environment before updating the live site, and of course make sure your backups are up to date. WooCommerce themselves offer a detailed guide on how to proceed with the update. You can check it out here.
WooCommerce Admin
The inclusion of the plugin into WooCommerce core brings many new features to shop owners. Primarily a new dashboard, new and improved reports, an improved notification experience, and new store management tools. Along with WooCommerce Admin comes an activity panel with improved order management workflow and consistency between the desktop and mobile experience. Due to JavaScript requirements the update is only available to stores running WordPress 5.3+.
Action Scheduler 3.1
The new version of action scheduler brings significant performance improvements by utilizing custom tables to provide a great experience even on stores with large volumes of orders and posts in the database.
New onboarding experience
A new onboarding experience has entered a testing phase with WooCommerce 4.0 aiming to make setting up a store much easier than before. 50% of new WooCommerce users will be able to set up their stores through the new onboarding experience.
Miscellaneous
Apart from the major changes above this version brings smaller improvements such as an enhanced order edit screen, the latest fixes of the WooCommerce Blocks package, updates related to Brexit and VAT, improvements to email handling, optimizations for saving variations and Cash on delivery payment gateway.
CSSIgniter eCommerce themes and WooCommerce 4.0.0
We have released updates for all themes that required compatibility adjustments for WooCommerce 4.0 you can update them using our automated update system if you get the update notification, or if you prefer to do things manually you can grab the zip files from our downloads section and install them.