WooCommerce 2.2 is Coming Soon: Here’s What’s New
WooCommerce plugin by WooThemes is getting a major update. According to the Develop WooCommerce blog, the new update, WooCommerce 2.2 code name “Prowling Pangolin”, will bring some features that WooCommerce users have been asking for a long time. Let's take a look at some of the new features WooCommerce 2.2 is getting ready with.
Order Status using post_status
You already know that when a customer places an order on a site that uses WooCommerce plugin, those orders will have one of the few order statuses such as on-hold, pending, processing, completed, etc. Up until now, WooCommerce stored those order statuses with orders via a taxonomy called shop_order_status. But the developers are getting rid of the taxonomy and introducing a new way to save these statuses as post_status.
WordPress already uses post_status to for regular posts to save status as published, pending, draft etc. WooCommerce 2.2 will be using the same post_status to store the status of the order. This means if WooCommerce 2.1 users update to 2.2 when it's released, they will have to modify your code to fully support the new version. Otherwise, as Mike Jolley from WooThemes puts it, you'll either get a notice, or no result.
Store Transaction ID
After customers purchase a product from your store and a transaction takes place, WooCommerce 2.2 will let you store the transaction ID in a standardized format. If you pass the transaction ID via $order->payment_complete( $transaction_id ); to the $order->payment_complete() method, WooCommerce 2.2 will save the transaction ID as post meta.
Optionally, you can also turn the transaction ID into a link to the transaction page of your payment gateway, for example, PayPal.
Refund Support
It's not an unlikely scenario that sometimes the customers of your online store will not be happy with a product they purchase and want a refund for it. If you've built your site with WooCommerce, good news for you! Because the next version of WooCommerce will be able to programatically handle refunds.
There's more! WooCommerce 2.2 will introduce version 2 of Rest API that supports PUT/POST/DELETE for Coupons, Orders, Products and customers. Also the WooCommerce 2.2 will have a language pack downloader. The core plugin will no longer include the language files in an attempt to reduce file size. So whenever you need to download a language pack, you can do so from your Dashboard.
You can take a look at the official WooCommerce blog for more information about the refund support and other features coming with the upcoming WooCommerce version.
Test Drive Now
If you're interested in taking a test drive of the upcoming WooCommerce plugin, you can download WooCommerce 2.2 Beta 1. Make sure to not use this on a production site yet. The version is as you can see still in beta and is intended for testing purpose only.
Which of the WooCommerce 2.2 feature is your favorite?
