CheckoutWC 3.8 is out and it’s a good one!
The biggest thing you need to know: CheckoutWC now requires PHP 7.x. No ifs, ands, or buts. No excuses. And absolutely no crying in baseball.
This change coincides with WooCommerce 4.4, which also requires PHP 7.x.
PHP 7.x is awesome. If you’re upgrading from PHP 5.x, you will see a tremendous performance increase.
If you aren’t sure what version of PHP you are on, go to WooCommerce > Status and look for PHP Version under Server environment.
If you aren’t sure how to upgrade PHP to 7.x, contact your hosting provider. They probably have a switch you can toggle in your hosting control panel and it usually only takes a few minutes.
Now, onto the release notes!
3.8 includes some really cool new features.
User Matching
The headline feature for CheckoutWC 3.8 is user matching.
User Matching does two things:
- When a new guest order is created, it automatically associates it with any existing account that matches the billing email address.
- When a new customer account is created, it associates any past guest orders with new account (matching on the billing email address)
This is great for your customers and great for you as a merchant who likely gets multiple emails a week asking why a guest order isn’t showing up under My Account!
Setting Importer / Exporter
The next exciting feature in 3.8 is a new Settings Importer / Exporter which can be found in the new Tools tab.
This allows you to do a few things:
- Backup your settings. Want to try some aggressive changes to your settings? Now you can backup your existing settings, giving you an easy way to revert if you decide you don’t like the new setup.
- Migrate your settings between sites. The settings importer automatically downloads the logo image to the new site, so you don’t have to worry about orphaned media.
Support for more plugins
In 3.8, we added full support for the following plugins:
- WooCommerce – Social Login (WPWeb)
- WooCommerce – MailerLite
- Pont shipping for WooCommerce
- Braintree for WooCommerce (PaymentPlugins)
Under the hood improvements
We made quite a few under-the-hood changes to improve performance and functionality.
- Refactored how we fingerprint the payment method HTML to prevent unnecessary refreshes. Now uses a 100% JS solution, just like core.
- Dropped jQuery Migrate from our dependencies.
- Added a bunch of new filters.
And a lot more.
Every release has bug fixes that, while awesome in their own right, really don’t justify a write-up. Here’s our full change log:
- New: CheckoutWC now requires PHP 7.0.
- New: Settings Exporter / Importer
- New: User Matching – automatically associate guest orders with existing accounts
- New: Support for WooCommerce – Social Login (WPWeb)
- New: Support for WooCommerce MailerLite
- New: Support for Pont shipping for Woocommerce
- New: Added Arabic translations.
- Improved: Allow shortcodes in empty cart redirect URL setting.
- Improved: Dropped jQuery Migrate from script requirements.
- Improved: Checks whether any shipping packages exist when determining whether to show the shipping tab or shipping totals.
- Improved: Refactored how we fingerprint payment methods to prevent unnecessary refreshes. Now uses JS just like WooCommerce core.
- Improved: Added new filters – cfw_ship_to_label, cfw_cart_totals_shipping_label, cfw_express_pay_separator_text
- Fix: Fully working Braintree for WooCommerce (PaymentPlugins) support.
- Fix: Fix issue where postal code reverted to wrong value with Square.
- Fix: Fix JS error with Ship Mondo.
- Fix: Fix issue where default WooCommerce notice wasn’t styled correctly.
- Fix: Fix bug with WooCommerce style registration that caused an inconsistent state.
- Fix: Fix bug that caused enable order notes setting to become unavailable after enabling.
- Fix: Fix issue where Klarna Checkout couldn’t succeed due to shipping phone field being required.