tl;dr
WooCommerce 8.6, delayed due to an Order Attribution Tracking issue, has been released. It features a new Product Details block style, six new layouts for the Product Collection block, and a sales column for marketing analytics.
For developers, it offers improved logging, a notice on Legacy REST API removal, simplified customer history calculation, and 8.6.1 patching four issues.
After a slight delay, WooCommerce 8.6 was released last week. An Order Attribution Tracking issue discovered in 8.5.2 prompted the delay so that a fix could be included in the 8.6 release. With 365 commits from 73 contributors, this latest version of WooCommerce introduces some slick new features and enhancements for merchants and developers.
Key Features
New Block Style for Product Details Block
WooCommerce 8.6 introduces a new ‘Styles’ area for the Product Details block with two options; Classic and Minimal. By default the Minimal style is selected on new installs with the Classic style being maintained to ensure compatibility with theme-based CSS customizations.
Product Collection Block Gains Six New Layouts
Probably the most impactful feature for merchants and marketers is the introduction of six new layouts for the Product Collection block. Now merchants can select between New Arrivals, Top Rated, Best Selling, On Sale, Featured and Product Catalog.
These new layouts can be combined, mixed and matched on a single page to respond better to the needs of merchants. For example, promote your new spring arrivals in a block above your winter sale items that leads into your complete product catalog.
Sales Column Added to Marketing Page
For merchants who are using WooCommerce to view and manage their marketing channels (i.e. Google Ad campaigns), a new column in the Sales card provides a quick look at how various campaigns are performing.
Developer Updates
Logging System Changes
Significant improvements have been made to the internal logging system in WooCommerce 8.6. Merchants and developers now have an interface for browsing and viewing log entries that will improve debugging and auditing in the future.
There is now a log file browser that lets users filter, sort and manage log files. Users can now click individual log files and view them right within their WordPress dashboard. Search has also been improved to enable selecting a group of files to search within, filtering, sorting and linking individual lines in files that contain the search term. Logs have also now been made fully exportable. Users can download individual files or in bulk via a zip file.
Legacy REST API Removal Notice
As WooCommerce prepares for the removal of its legacy REST API in 9.0, merchants still using the legacy API will now see a notice of the upcoming change. Given the pace of releases, this means deprecation/removal is about 4 months away.
Simplified Customer History Calculation
With Order Attribution Tracking the main cause for the delay in releasing 8.6, a simplified customer history calculation was introduced to mitigate the risk of a calculation resulting in 500 errors (server errors) on larger shops.
8.6.1 Release Patches 4 Issues
A patch was released earlier this week that fixes four issues identified with the release of 8.6. These issues were significant enough that this release was issued very quickly. Check out the details on the WooCommerce Developer blog.
w00t Dev Docs
By Ronny Shani
Shortly before the release, the team launched a brand new documentation website for developers. The Woo Developer Docs embraces the docs-as-code approach, hosting markdown files in a centralized location: the docs folder of the project’s GitHub monorepo.
This approach is a win-win:
- It encourages community collaboration and empowers users to contribute to the documentation.
- It enables the plugin’s developers to update docs whenever they modify or update WooCommerce’s codebase.
Improving the developer experience is part of Woo’s roadmap; V1 is a great example of how to do it right.
Progress On New Product Editor
Finally, a small tweak to the new Product Editor was introduced, adding the ability to mark a product as Featured. Merchants using the new Product Editor can click an inline star icon in the title field. The new product editor is making steady progress as it reshapes the way merchants interact with WooCommerce in the product creation flow.
If you have not yet, now is a good time to give the new Product Editor a test drive to see what’s coming and how the interface of WooCommerce is changing.
