Today we’re excited to release WooCommerce 3.4 into the wild!  3.4 is a “minor” release; this version should be backwards compatible with sites running versions of WooCommerce greater than 3.0. We do of course recommend ensuring your extensions and themes are compatible before upgrading, and making backups for peace of mind–see this handy guide for more details.

For those on the Website Care Plan: If a problem is seen after the update and the problem is due to the update itself, we will attempt to resolve the problem. If the problem takes more that 30 minutes to resolve, you will be invoiced at our normal hourly rate.

For those on the Business Continuity Plan: Before any updated are preformed, we will clone your existing site and make all the necessary updates for testing. No charge, worry free updates! If a problem is seen after the update and the problem is due to the update itself, we will attempt to resolve the problem at no charge no matter how long it takes.

Once the update is done on  your we will notify you so that you can preform in-depth testing to make sure all functions and process are functioning properly.

New & Updates Features

GDPR features, tweaks, and settings

This release introduces several tools, tweaks, and settings to help with GDPR compliance:

• User data export, erasure, and anonymization tools.
• Settings for enabling automatic data cleanup or removal.
• New Customizer settings for checkout fields and policy notices on the Checkout page.
• Tweaks to logging to ensure personal data does not get logged.

These features tie into and require WordPress 4.9 to function.

To learn more about these features we recommend reading the detailed breakdown and explanation from our earlier post.

We have also published a series of posts on the main WooCommerce blog explaining how to get your site ready for GDPR which all store owners should read, and developers should pass on to their clients.

GeoLite2 integration

WooCommerce uses the MaxMind GeoLite database for geolocation during checkout to automatically select the customer’s correct country. The GeoLite database has been discontinued by MaxMind, and GeoLite2 is the replacement. This release adds support for and integrates WooCommerce with GeoLite2 to ensure geolocation will continue working correctly for the forseeable future. The whole process is automatic and no further action is needed on the store owner’s part to keep geolocation working correctly.

The library that integrates with GeoLite2 requires a minimum PHP version of 5.4. As a necessary step WooCommerce will not support geolocation using GeoLite2 on PHP versions less than 5.4.

On sites running those PHP versions geolocation will be done through other APIs. The API-based geolocation is a slower method, and it is recommended you update your PHP version if you are running a version less than 5.4.

If you need help upgrading your PHP version, we have a guide available.

Features for store owners

Here’s some other new features you may find useful while using WooCommerce:

• A multisite dashboard widget that shows order information from across all sites.
• Wildcard email support for coupon restrictions. Using the wildcard character you can set up coupons restricted to groups of similar email addresses (.edu email accounts, corporate email accounts from a certain business, etc.).
• Users can now set their display name on the My Account page.
• Improvements to the admin product search, including the ability to search for multiple products in the same query.

Features for store builders and developers

If you’re building stores for clients, or just developing on top of WooCommerce, here’s some new toys at your disposal:

• We’ve moved all photoswipe styles to their own CSS file to make them easy to dequeue if needed.
• You can declare a custom data sanitization callback in the settings API.
• We’ve added support for additional HTML5 input types for settings and checkout forms.
• Lots of new filters and actions to increase the customizability of WooCommerce.

On top of the new features, there are a variety of minor tweaks, new hooks, and fixes in this minor release. We won’t go into detail here, but you can see the full list of changes in the readmeif you’re interested!