WooCommerce 2.0 beta 2 is here

The new beta of the fantastic Woocommerce is here, here are some words from the Woo team:

The past two weeks have been filled with spending time with family and friends, but a lot of people have squeezed in time to test the first beta of WooCommerce 2.0. We’re really happy with all the feedback we’ve been getting, thanks for all the testing!

All of the bug reports, combined with a lot of people contributing code, have enabled us to release the second beta today already. This second beta contains a lot of bug fixes and smaller tweaks, but there are a couple changes that I like to highlight in this post.

This post contains everything new in the second beta of WooCommerce 2.0. For the full list of new features in WooCommerce 2.0, please read through everything in the beta 1 announcement or read the full changelog on GitHub.

As always, let me stress this one more time: Do not use this version on a live website, as it’s not stable enough yet. Things might break if you use this on a live website.

Testing beta 2

With the second beta available, it is becoming more important to be as detailed as possible in your bug reports. The issues that are popping up now are becoming harder to reproduce and therefore we appreciate all the information we can get about possible bugs.

Before reporting a bug, please search the issues to see if the bug hasn’t been reported or fixed already. If you can, provide the code to fix the issue and make it even more easy for us.

What’s new in beta 2?

We started with the same code as we provided to you to test and right now we’re a little over 100 changes since beta 1. The following changes require some extra attention while testing:

• The country field in the checkout form has been moved to the top of the form. This makes the country field (if required) the first choice a customer has to make in the form and that makes the form more logically structured. At the same time, it is in line with how bigger stores (like Amazon) have their checkout forms laid out.
• We have improved the memory usage of the entire plugin. We removed an infinite loop in our Settings API as the main cause, but also improved the efficiency of our code and file loading. This should make the plugin run faster and using less memory.
• We have standardised the CSS class names, all classes are now prefixed woocommerce- instead of woocommerce_, woocommerce- and wc- mixed. Please check your custom CSS and JS files to see if they are still working.

As with all new beta releases, it is important to properly test everything and see if all your custom code or third party plugins still work. Remember, the beta stages are the best phase in development for us to fix bigger bugs, so the sooner you can test your code, the better.

Preparing all our premium products

While everybody has been real busy testing the new WooCommerce code, we are also hard at work in a joint effort with our extension developers to get all our premium extensions compatible with WooCommerce 2.0. The same goes for our theme development team, who are making sure all our themes work just fine with this new version of WooCommerce.

We will not release WooCommerce 2.0 before all our premium extensions and themes have been checked and made compatible, so as a shop owner you don’t have to worry about that. When the day comes that WooCommerce 2.0 is released, please do check the version of the extensions and themes you are using against the latest available stable versions.

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