There’s a lot to love in the latest release of WooCommerce

Among the usual refinements, bug fixes, and streamlining of the system, the latest release of WooCommerce brings some new features which I think will be well received and put to use quite often.

The Biggie – Page Blocks

For anyone who’s had experience with page builders in WordPress, WooCommerce’s own Page Blocks will feel very familiar. Being able to combine content and product information has always been a benefit of working with WordPress and WooCommerce, and this latest effort expands nicely on this.

They essentially operate like page widgets, providing a quick and easy way to create your own product-based layouts:

• Products by Category
• Best Selling Products
• Hand-picked Products
• Newest Products
• On Sale Products
• Top-Rated Products
• Products by Attribute
• Featured Product

There are controls for paging, sorting, and the number of columns and rows for the grid. As expected, the new Page Blocks feature can be easily customized and extended by theme authors, so you can bet this feature will integrate nicely with your own design and layouts too.

For more info on the new Page Blocks feature, check out the source post from Woocommerce.

Other Improvements

Performance
Significant performance improvements have been made, and should be quite easy to notice. Most notably, page load times have improved more than 60% on pages where filtering and sorting products takes place. Other performance improvements have been made by reducing load times for product data (such as products with many attributes). It gets more technical after that, so we’ll just file the rest of the improvements under “good housekeeping”.

Minor Feature Updates and Additions
Sometimes, great new features, or tweaks show up in the footnotes. In this round there are a few things of interest:

• The bulk editing feature for WooCommerce now allows you to do bulk stock adjustments.
• When adding/editing/deleting a product from an order, the on-hand quantities for that product are updated to reflect that event and it will now also be noted on the order.
• When customers type URLs into the order notes, those URLs will convert to live links as they are stored with the order info.

And the Immediate Fix Right After…

Almost instantly after WooCommerce version 3.6 was released, a problem became apparent that was “causing issues with some hosting environments.” Based on the information they provided, it sounds like it may only have been one or two, but you can read more details on this here if you like.

All in all, this minor update brings a few new gadgets to try out and performance improvements, which are always great!