WooCommerce 3.0 Hs finally arrived and this is the biggest release in a long time. 2.6 was released back in June last year but 2.0 was released all the way back in 2013, which is decades in internet time. Though technically this is more like 2.7, WooComemrce have just changed their release naming to Semantic Versioning.
A major release means major upgrades, so here is a quick highlight of what is included:
- An updated product gallery with new zoom, gallery view and mobile features
- Multiple speed and performance improvements
- The addition of CRUD classes
- A new CLI powered by the REST API
For most users, the main functional difference is the product gallery and this includes:
- Shoppers can now both magnify images from the page, and zoom into them from a lightbox popup
- If you have more than one image, the gallery behaviour is more intuitive; for example, clicking a thumbnail updates the image you’re already viewing instead of opening a lightbox popup window
- Dramatic improvements for mobile gallery views, including touch gestures: swipe to scroll through the gallery, pinch to zoom, and swipe up to close the current image
- Zooming into a product image on mobile now displays the image’s true size — previously it would scale to match the (very small) browser window, not an ideal experience!
This is all great, but unfortunately, some problems manifest from it. The new gallery requires specific programming changes to the theme, and we have noticed a few glitches on our client sites. Each theme needs the new functionally loaded. For developers reading this, this can be carried out by:
add_action( 'after_setup_theme', 'yourtheme_setup' );
function yourtheme_setup() {
add_theme_support( 'wc-product-gallery-zoom' );
add_theme_support( 'wc-product-gallery-lightbox' );
add_theme_support( 'wc-product-gallery-slider' );
}
This allows you the flexibility to pick and choose exactly which features you want to include/exclude in your theme or at your store.
If you require some help with your eCommerce store due to the changes in WooCommerce 3.0 then feel free to contact us.
