WooCommerce 3.6 has arrived!

APRIL 17, 2019/TIMMY CRAWFORD – https://woocommerce.wordpress.com
Today we are excited to announce the availability of WooCommerce 3.6. The latest release of WooCommerce has been in development since November 2018, and during that time, 3.6 has had 2279 commits from 122 contributors.

3.6 is a “minor” release; this version should be backwards compatible with sites running versions of WooCommerce greater than or equal to 3.0. We do of course recommend ensuring your extensions and themes are compatible before upgrading, and making backups for peace of mind —please see this guide for more details.

Product Blocks

For store operators and builders, one of the biggest additions in WooCommerce 3.6 is the introduction of our new Product Blocks for the WordPress block editor.

For all sites running WordPress 5.0 or higher, you will have access to build rich landing pages using the following blocks now available in WooCommerce 3.6:

Products by Category
Best Selling Products
Hand-picked Products
Newest Products
On Sale Products
Top-Rated Products
Products by Attribute
Featured Product
To learn more about what you can do with the new Product Blocks, and how developers can customize them, check out this post.

Performance Improvements
Customers and Store Owners will experience a noticeably faster experience due to extensive performance enhancements that improve both admin and frontend page load times. For full details around the performance enhancements that are available in 3.6, please be sure to read our developer post which takes a deep dive into the technical side of things.

A few quick highlights of the improvements on the front-end for sites running WooCommerce 3.6 are:

A 62% improvement in the load time when ordering and filtering products
Reduced overall load time by bypassing inactive webhooks
Reduced the load time for pages with category or product attribute lists
Reduced load time of product pages with attributes
Additional Updates
In addition to the new Product Blocks and Performance Improvements, you will find the following enhancements in WooCommerce 3.6:

The ability to increase/decrease stock options via the bulk edit form.
Accessibility improvements on the shop order-by selector.
When adding/editing/deleting items manually from orders, the corresponding product stock will be updated to reflect the event, and an order note will also log the action.
Added suggestions for official extensions.
Store attribute values as post_excerpt for variations to support easier searching for variations.
Customer notes containing URLs now automatically converts to clickable links.
Allow states in zones to be searched by country name.
Added registration success notices to account pages.
Beyond these enhancements, the release also contains some tweaks, new hooks and various fixes – all of which you can find out about in the readme.

Upgrading to 3.6
3.6 is a minor update and should be compatible with sites running any version of WooCommerce greater than or equal to 3.0. We still recommend testing and backing up prior to upgrading just to be safe.

Note: There are a few post-update database upgrade routines that need to run after updating. These may run for a while if you have a large amount of data in your database. On very large databases we recommend running the upgrade routine with the WP CLI command wp wc update instead of through the admin interface.

If you’re a developer and missed the beta and release candidate (RC), the following information may be useful:

Deprecated in 3.6
wc_get_min_max_price_meta_query – removed in favour of lookup tables which remove the need to filter via post meta.
Term meta helper functions – deprecated in favour of WP core term meta functions such as https://developer.wordpress.org/reference/functions/get_term_meta/. These have not been needed since WP 4.4.
WC_Country::load_country_states – States are now loaded on the fly as needed.
WC_Cache_Helper::delete_version_transients – Transients are now versioned within the value negating the need for cleanup.
WC_Background_Updater – We’ve switched updates to the ActionScheduler queue.
Simplify Commerce – This gateway has been deprecated for several years and hidden in the UI. The code has now been removed.
Template File Changes in 3.6
File Changes
content-product.php Passing $product to wc_product_class() to avoid re-read of product
content-single-product.php Passing $product to wc_product_class() to avoid re-read of product
single-product-reviews.php Support for wc_review_ratings_enabled()
cart/cart-shipping.php Verbiage changes
checkout/form-billing.php Update _e usage to esc_html_e
checkout/form-shipping.php Update _e usage to esc_html_e
emails/admin-cancelled-order.php Copy reworded, double escape fix
emails/customer-note.php Made note clickable
global/form-login.php Updated order of remember me and submit buttons.
global/quantity-input.php w3C validation fixes
loop/orderby.php Added aria label.
loop/rating.php Star rating bug fix.
myaccount/form-edit-address.php Added names to nonces, setting country value bug fix
myaccount/form-login.php Added actions woocommerce_before_lost_password_form and woocommerce_after_lost_password_form
order/form-tracking.php PHPCS
single-product/product-attributes.php Added filter woocommerce_display_product_attributes to give full control of output
single-product/rating.php wc_review_ratings_enabled() support
single-product/review-rating.php wc_review_ratings_enabled() support
How 3.6 was tested
3.6 beta was released on March 15th 2019 and remained in beta until the RC on March 28th 2019. During this time we:

Tested internally, tested our own extensions and themes.
Tested popular premium themes.
Did some managed updates for actual customers on staging sites to pick up on any conflicts or bugs before the public release.
Tested and updated WooCommerce.com itself to be running 3.6.