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WooCommerce 3.0 “Bionic Butterfly” has just arrived!

WooCommerce 3.0, the Bionic Butterfly, is here!

WooCommerce 3.0 is now available for download. This is a great update, which lays the foundation of a more powerful, flexible and scalable e-commerce system, and it will greatly improve the e-commerce experience for millions of merchants and buyers worldwide.

Still, “with great change comes great responsibility”. Yes, the original sentence was slightly different, but it applies nevertheless. The improvements that WooCommerce 3.0 brings can have side effects, therefore we would like to repeat our invitation to being careful with the upgrade.

Below you can find a summary of the information we sent to our newsletter subscribers. We recommend to keep this information handy, as it will make the update process easier and smoother.

What you should do before updating WooCommerce

In the past few weeks, we sent a step by step upgrade guide to our subscribers, describing our recommended way of upgrading WooCommerce. You can find it below, if you missed our email, or if you are not registered to our newsletter.

The most important concept to keep in mind that you should not update your live site immediately. It looks like a tempting shortcut, but we strongly recommend not to do that (you can take our word on this). Instead, you should follow a few simple steps:

  1. Take a full backup of the live site.
    Tip: if you don’t have a strategy for automated backups, we would strongly recommend to prepare one as soon as possible. Please feel free to contact us if you need more information.
  2. Ensure that the backup is usable and ready to be restored in case of emergency.
  3. Create a copy of your site on a staging/test server. Work only on the test copy.
  4. Update all the plugins, except WooCommerce, to the latest versions.
    Note: some updates might not appear in the WordPress Plugins page.You can always get the latest versions of the Aelia plugins from the My Account section on our site.
  5. Update your theme to the latest version.
  6. Update WooCommerce.
  7. Test the site extensively, to make sure that all the plugins you are running, as well as your theme, are compatible with WooCommerce 3.0.
  8. If you spot any issue, contact the authors of the affected plugin or theme before updating the live site.
  9. Apply any fix provided by plugin authors and repeat the testing from step #7.

When you are comfortable that the test site is working correctly, you can repeat the above steps on the live site.

This process may look long and boring, but it’s worth spending some time to double check that the shop will work fine after an update, as that will prevent unexpected crashes and downtimes.

Recommended reading

The WooCommerce Team also wrote a useful article to guide you through the upgrade process: How to prepare your WooCommerce store for any release. We recommend to read it and familiarise yourself with the steps required for a smooth upgrade.

Compatibility status of the Aelia plugins

We updated our plugins to work with WooCommerce 2.7 a couple of months ago, and tested them again with WooCommerce 3.0. Below you can find a list of the plugins that you will have to update before installing WooCommerce 3.0, together with their version number and release date:

Our tests showed that plugins such as Shipping Country, or the Blacklister, should already be compatible with WooCommerce 3.0. We will keep reviewing them as updates for the new version are released, to ensure maximum compatibility.
Of course, should you find any issue, please report it, and we will look into it as soon as possible.

Important
Our licensing system is still undergoing maintenance, and you might not receive an update notification in your WordPress Admin Panel. We would recommend you to follow our our site, our Twitter account or our Facebook page, where you will find the information about new releases there. You will then be able to download them from our site, or from the download link you received with your email.
Once our licensing system will be back up, you should start receiving update notifications from within WordPress.

Need assistance, or have any questions?

Should you need help, or have any questions about our plugins and how to update them before installing WooCommerce 3.0, please get in touch. We will get back to you as soon as possible, with the information you need.

Thanks for your time, and have a great day and an amazing weekend!

Sincerely,

Aelia – The Internationalisation Experts

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