WooCommerce 3.0 – The Bionic Butterfly Is Finally Set Free
WooCommerce has just released a major update this week, which is now available for download. Having been in development since August 2016, the 3.0 was in beta testing since December. It took 3000 commits from 115 contributors to finally develop and release the Bionic Butterfly into the wild. It has been long since WooCommerce released a major update and it looks like we are going to get our money’s worth with the 3.0 version.
Let’s look at some of the cool features that comes with 3.0.
The new update includes a new CLI which is powered by the REST API. A new and improved product gallery with mobile features, zoom and gallery view. It also comes with several performance and speed improvements. You can also modify orders, products and a lot of things with the new CRUD classes added to the 3.0.
REST API Powered CLI
In 2.5 and 2.6, the CLI was powered by its own code. This resulted in code duplication across the code base. With 3.0, comes a big change. WooCommerce has overhauled the command line interface which is now powered by the REST API.
Users can now manage their data faster with this new CLI. This would also reduce the amount of code you need to use. The new CLI also gives users more power and commands. There are also certain things that weren’t possible with the previous CLI that are now possible with the REST API.
Some new endpoints to REST API are also included:
- Support for metadata on most endpoints.
- New variations endpoints for creating and updating variations. In addition, we’ve prevented the (broken) ability to manipulate variations directly on the products’ endpoints.
- Settings endpoints (update/view shop settings).
- Shipping zones endpoints.
Updated Gallery
Users haven’t been impressed by the gallery’s functionality for quite some time now. And it was about time that changes were made. The 3.0 is now equipped with better functionalities for mobile devices and small screen sizes. After conducting a poll and several tests, the developers finally came up with the perfect solution for the image gallery.
With the new update, users get more functionalities and mobile-friendliness than the previous versions. Shoppers can now magnify the images from the page and zoom into them from a lightbox popup. If you have multiple images of a product, the image will update upon clicking it’s thumbnail.
You can now pinch to zoom and swipe to close the current page on mobile devices. This is part of the dramatic improvements for mobile gallery views. Zooming in images in mobile devices will now display its true size.
Performance Upgrade
3.0 also comes with a huge performance upgrade. If you have a big store and have a large number of products with a wide variety, then you are more likely to notice this huge update. Product visibility which was previously post-meta, and was used in all the previous WooCommerce updates. A new taxonomy is used in 3.0 which improves product speed by 94%.
Featured products are also using the new taxonomy instead of the post meta which improves queries. Furthermore, if you are hiding out-of-stock products you will see improvements in that regard as well.
CRUD Classes To 3.0
Before 3.0, developers had many ways to write data for database,orders and products. They also had many ways to retrieve data as well. This entire process required the developers to know what type of data they are working on and this was time-consuming and complicated.
To make sure that developers use a single method of writing and retrieving data, WooCommerce 3.0 introduced CRUD. It stands for Create, Read, Update, Delete – the four basic operations you can do to a resource. With the CRUD classes you can now modify orders, products, customers, line items, shipping zones, payment tokens, and coupons with lesser codes than before. This means that you only need to know the name of the data you are working with instead of the types or other details. Since you need fewer codes, there will be less changes. The data is more mobile through CRUD as well.
Conclusion
WooCommerce 3.0 has been a long time coming, we are excited that it is out now and has so many features that were needed to improve overall usability and performance.
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