Woocommerce 4.1 beta – new features

As of April 7th, WooCommerce 4.1 beta is out and available for testing. You have the option to download it straight from WordPress.org or try out the new WooCommerce Beta Tester plugin.

What’s new on WooCommerce 4.1

Primary focus when developing this release, is performance and stability.

There is a New Setup Wizard

With the current release, the new setup wizard is complete, and from now on all newly created shops will be directed through the new setup flow.

Database Update

A database update was required with the new release, as a new table was added to the database structure of WooCommerce. It’s of vital importance for processing newly made orders and checkout. It’s installed automatically right after update.

Check your WordPress version

An important note is that there are no minimum requirements for this version, however for all websites which are still running on WordPress 5.2 a notification will appear to remind users to upgrade.

The reason for this is that in the next scheduled release for WooCommerce 4.2, there will be a scheduled update for the minimum version of WordPress 5.2, in order for users to keep up will all new changes in the WordPress environment.

Hooks and Functions

A number of hooks and functions were added to the new release.

Changes to the Template File

There has been an update to the following template file:

Release Schedule

Testing

You can find detailed testing guides on the WooCommerce Wiki page in GitHub, as well as a writeup on beta testing for some additional help.