After a slight launch delay, WooCommerce has released a major new update, with new features, and a new versioning system.
Here’s a quick breakdown of some of the newest features:
- A brand new product gallery with zoom, gallery view and new mobile features
- Speed boosts and performance improvements
- Other developer level items like the addition of CRUD classes and a new CLI (Command Line Interface) powered by the REST API.
New Product Gallery
The native WooCommerce product gallery has always been a fairly okay solution for showing off multiple images. But the functionality could have been improved for quite a few years now to keep up with other online shopping platforms. The new gallery now has more functionality, is more mobile friendly, and more intuitive to use:
Your theme might not be fully compatible with the new gallery, so check out this article on what might need to be updated for compatibility in your theme.
Speed boost
Everybody wants a faster website, and larger shops with hundreds of products might have felt that need more than most. WooCommerce 3.0 has addressed speed issues:
- Taxonomies are now used to determine certain product visibility, such as featured products, and out of stock products. This new system replaces the previous system based on post meta, which is slower.
- The number of queries to the database has been reduced for upsells and related products on both product pages and cart pages.
Developer stuff
Since this is a major version release, there’s a ton more changes that went on under the hood. And while I find most of it an interesting read, regurgitating it here is not. Check out these links if you want to read more:
So far so good
So far I haven’t had a chance to play much with the new features, but we’ve been working hard to make sure our WooCommerce Support client’s get upgraded smoothly.
Let us know if you need help getting the new gallery implemented, we’d love to see it in action on your site.
