WooCommerce 3.0 " Bionic Butterfly Was released today with significant enhancements to the Product Gallery and Developer Tools. This version, which was previously 2.7, is the first major release since the plugin moved to semantic versioning. It has been offered for three months in beta and with a trial period of the RC (release Candidate) extended which allowed the extension and theme developers to adapt to new features.

The new product gallery has subtle improvements for galleries with multiple images. By clicking on a thumbnail the image will open in a pop-up window.

Galleries 3.0 are also more intuitive on mobile with support for touch gestures, including swiping to scroll gallery, pinch to zoom, and swipe to close the current image. There are also several bug fixes and UX improvements that provide a much smoother experience in viewing product images.

This release includes significant performance improvements, thanks to the passage of taxonomy metas for features such as product visibility, featured products and on stock products. Contributors WooCommerce also reduced the number of queries needed to view related products and upsells.

The 3.0 version presents of CRUD classes (Create, Read, Update, Delete) for developers, making it easier to write and retrieve data from the basis of data with less code.

« High order volume is one of the issues a store can have, and it can really slow down your site's performance., » The lead developer of WooCommerce Mike Jolley said. " That's why the main focus of our team this year is performance and scalability.. Enhancements on scalability are planned for future releases.

Version 3.0 also introduced a new command line interface (CLI) powered by the REST API. The previous CLI did not fully support the same functionality and was powered by its own separate code. This cuts down on the amount of code WooCommerce has to maintain and ensures that orders are always up to date just like the REST API project is.

WooCommerce Support Forums on WordPress.org were featured with queries after version 3.0 was released. One particular issue pinned to the top of the forums is an incompatibility with " Select2 v3 ". The latest version of WooCommerce uses "Select2 V4" and this can cause issue with AJAX search entries with plugins and themes that use the older version of Select2.

Another problem was reported on the upgrade of frontend pages that suffered from endless refreshment, which WooCommerce developers have identified as a problem with the geolocation tuning. They are working on a fix for the 3.0.1 version.

Many users who after updating to version 3.0 discovered incompatibilities with themes or plugins. This version received more than 3000 commits for 115 collaborators. With this number of changes packed into a major release, the WooCommerce developers recommend testing it on a staging site and making a backup before updating the plugin. This will give you the opportunity to make sure your theme and plugins are compatible with the update.

If you want to create a WordPress test space, you can read our tutorial on Poopy.Life. which is a website which allows you to create unlimited installations of WordPress. You can add your plugins there.

That's it for this tutorial, are you already using WooCommerce 3.0? If so what is your experience?