After a year of development and almost three months in public beta, WOOTHEMES has released WooCommerce version 2.1. If you’re looking for huge changes to functionality, this isn’t the release for you. There are couple features worth noting that will be important for certain customers.
- API: They have introduced a native API. This allows the system to be opened up to external platforms for integration. For example customers of Shipwire and Shipworks currently have to install a plugin to handle the data synchronization for orders and shipping. With the introduction of an API, those platforms can be setup to integrate directly into WooCommerce without need for an additional plugin. It also opens up the system for development companies like ours to have easier access building custom integrations or reporting tools.
- REPORTING: Reporting has gotten a big update in that it now supports robust filtering and native abilities to export your filtered and non-filtered reports to CSV (MS Excel). For many basic customers, this should remove the need for additional reporting plugins or custom reporting integrations.
- RESPONSIVE: Probably the biggest change for customers upgrading is the WooCommerce templates have become. While all of our sites are built to be responsive, this helps speed our coding along by supporting it out of the box.
For customers upgrading, we recommend scheduling this through us since it’s highly suggested that we have time allocated to update your site layout to support the new responsive changes before making the upgrade. Additionally, a handful of small bugs have popped up in the 2.10 release. Currently there have been two small releases (2.11 and 2.12) since 2.1 was released and we are monitoring the bug fixe logs daily. We encourage customers to contact us to schedule their upgrades which should be in the next one to two weeks.