Use WooCommerce for your WordPress store? It might be time to get ready for the next major WooCommerce update.
WooCommerce suggests that store owners, read this helpful guide on preparing for an update. It’s an older post, but the general tips still apply:
- Have a testing plan for each major update
- Set up and automate backups so your store is safe and easily restored
- Duplicate your store so you have a second nearly-identical version to test 3.0.0
Wait 3.0.0?
If you’re wondering whether you missed something, don’t worry yes there is a jump to 3.0.0. That’s because during the 2.7 beta testing phase, the team, discovered a critical bug in the way the system handles timestamps.
The bug would delay the release so they decided to revise their version numbers.
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Mike Jolley, lead developer of WooCommerce, says they’ve decided to adopt semantic versioning. The numbering system would reflect a MAJOR.MINOR.PATCH increment so a:
- 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.
So 3.0.0 will be a major update and 3.1.0 will be a minor update and if another major update is made it would be released as 4.0.0.
This is in contrast to WordPress where version numbers don’t really mean anything – an update to 5.0 is no more significant that the upgrade between 4.8 and 4.9.
In addition to version changes and bug fixes, the team is allowing up to three weeks for version 3.0.0 RC1 to be tested.
Try it out
The release candidate for WooCommerce 3.0.0, “Bionic Butterfly” is now available.
To test WooCommerce 3.0.0 RC1, you can use the WooCommerce Beta Tester plugin or you can download the release candidate here (zip).
