Hi there!
The beta version of WooCommerce 8.6 is now available for testing! You can either download it directly from WordPress.org or install our WooCommerce Beta Tester Plugin.
What’s new in WooCommerce 8.6?
WooCommerce 8.6 adds some interesting features like:
New block style for the Product Details block
As a part of our efforts to enhance the default state of WooCommerce for block themes, we have introduced a new block style for the Product Details block. This new style will provide an improved design on the default product page and be mobile-friendly.
The “Classic” style will be retained to ensure compatibility with theme-based CSS customizations.
Six new collections added to the Product Collection Block
To make it easier for you to promote your products, we have introduced six new collections to the Product Collection block. When you add the Product Collection block to the Editor, you will now be prompted to choose from one of the available Collections:
- New Arrivals – recommend your newest products,
- Top Rated – recommend products with the highest review ratings,
- Best Selling – recommend your best-selling products,
- On Sale – highlight products that are currently on sale,
- Featured – showcase your featured products,
- Product Catalog – use it to display all products in the catalog or configure it manually as before.
The next video demonstrates how you can use these new Collections to create a Shop page that showcases:
- New Arrivals at the top,
- the store’s Product Catalog in the center,
- On Sale products at the bottom.
It’s also possible to convert one Collection into another:
Start experimenting with these new Collections and let us know what you think through GitHub issues or a feedback form!
Featured products in the New Product Form
You can now mark products as featured in the New Product Form:
New important notices for Legacy REST API users
The Legacy REST API will be removed from WooCommerce in version 9.0 and moved to a separate extension. We have added new notices for Legacy REST API users to make sure they are aware of this change prior to WooCommerce 9.0.
Improvements to debug logging
The internal logging system in WooCommerce has undergone an overhaul, with the goal of making it more useful for developers, merchants, and support folks. For this update, we focused on the filesystem method of storing logs (as opposed to the database method). The biggest change is the interface for browsing and viewing log entries, but lots of other under-the-hood enhancements have also been added.
Log file browser
This is an entirely new view that lets you filter, sort, and manage log files.
Single file viewer
This view displays the contents of a single log file. It has been enhanced to emphasize the beginning of new entries and the severity level, allow for highlighting and permalinking specific lines in a file, and displaying additional context data for a log entry in a legible way.
Search
String search was already available with the database logger, but was lacking from the file system logger. This enables selecting a group of files to search within using filtering and sorting, and then linking to the individual lines in the files that contain the desired results.
Export
Log files are now exportable! You can download the files individually or in bulk as a zip file.
Settings
Before, the parts of the logging system that were configurable required adding constants or filters in PHP code. Now there is a UI for managing these settings.
Other logging changes
In both the filesystem and database logging methods, data included in the $context parameter when adding a log entry is now stored and surfaced in the interface when viewing logs. You can also have the logger generate and include a backtrace in the context data.
More updates
- Added rudimentary try catch for all remote endpoint spec evaluators to prevent fatal errors (#44037).
- Fixed fatal errors due to compatibility with PHP 8 (#44007).
- Added new endpoint for retrieving suggested products from the REST API (#43720).
- Added a new item to search for HPOS orders by product or customer, increasing the performance of these searches by about 2x (#43356).
- Added a HPOS CLI tool to compare an order between datastores (#43173).
For the complete list, view the changelog in the readme for this release.
Database changes
This release adds a new update to the database in order to remove the old marketing recommendations transient wc_marketing_recommended_plugins as it is not used anymore. This change was introduced by #43162.
Release Schedule
We’re on track for our planned February 13, 2024 release.
| Version | Release |
| Release Candidate | February 6, 2024 |
| Final Release | February 13, 2024 |
Testing
If you’d like to dive in and help test this new release, our handy WooCommerce Beta Tester plugin allows you to switch between beta versions and release candidates. You can also download the release from WordPress.org.
We’ve posted a helpful writeup on beta testing to help get you started.
If you discover any bugs during the testing process, please let us know by logging a report in GitHub.
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