We were expecting a brand new, major release version of WooCommerce to be released today (2.7), but in a post on the WooCommerce Dev blog, it looks like it’s being pushed back a few weeks, likely April 4th.
Critical bug found
Pushing back the release will allow the developers to fix a bug found in the way WooCommerce handles timezones and timestamps, and the team felt it was important to fix it now before release.
I appreciate the team’s willingness to push back a highly anticipated release in the name of getting it right and not causing issues. I’m sure this seems like a no-brainer move, but it’s not unheard of for dev teams to push a release that isn’t ready or has issues.
Changing to Semantic Versioning
In an effort to help clarify how new releases are versioned, the WooCommerce team has decided to change the way they number versions. Up to now they’ve incrementally numbers much like WordPress core does. This has lead to some confusion as to what is included – major updates, features, or simple fixes. Developers have raised concerns that this leads to misinterpreted version numbers and lack of ‘real meaning.’
For example, the update from WordPress 3.9 to 4.0 was no more significant that the upgrade between 4.1 to 4.2. It’s just a number.
To remedy this the team has decided to adopt SemVer:
Given a version number MAJOR.MINOR.PATCH, increment the:
MAJOR version when you make incompatible API changes,
MINOR version when you add functionality in a backwards-compatible manner, and
PATCH version when you make backwards-compatible bug fixes.
I’m happy to hear they are adopting the new versioning. It’ll make updating our WooCommerce clients sites that much easier to understand and explain.
What this means to Cinch WooCommerce subscribers
Generally speaking, for our current WooCommerce support subscribers nothing at all will change. We continually monitor what the WooCommerce dev team is doing and will continue to ensure compatibility with our sites.
The great news is that WooCommerce continues to be developed in an ongoing, customer-conscious way to improve the product for both site owners and their customers.
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