New Release: BigCommerce for WordPress 3.17.0

This release announcement covers three releases. 3.15 was a full release, 3.16 was a hotfix, and 3.17 is again a full release.

There are some really exciting new features in these releases, some things that have been feature requests for quite some time.

Below, we’ll highlight a few of the biggest updates, but you can find detailed release notes in the CHANGELOG.md file at WordPress.org.

Added

Continue Shopping Link Destination
Previously, if you went to the Cart page with no products there was a link that said “Continue Shopping” and took the customer to the site homepage. Now there’s a switch in the customizer that allows the merchant to choose whether that link goes to the homepage or the Product Catalog.

Additionally, there’s a new filter called bigcommerce/cart/continue_shopping_url which would allow you to make that link go to any URL using code.

Routing Information
Previously, if the site owner wanted to see routing information they had to log into BigCommerce. Now routing information is in the BC4WP settings area.

TwentyTwenty Theme Updates
The current default theme for WordPress is called TwentyTwenty and its default layouts are quite narrow for ecommerce. We’ve added some custom templates for that theme that work well.

Changing Category and Brand Slugs
For quite some time now a store’s main slug ( /products/ ) has been changeable in the customizer. Now you can also change the default slugs for /category/ and /brands/ to anything you wish in the customizer.

Larger Images

A customizer setting has been created to allow for a larger image in both the Image Gallery on single product pages as well as locations where the Featured Image is found.

Note:

• Modifications were made to the product-gallery.php and product-featured-image.php templates to accommodate these new changes. Update your template overrides accordingly.
• Styles updates were also adjusted to accommodate this new image size by adding a new body class: .bc-gallery-size-bc-xmedium

Product Zoom Feature
A consistent feature request has been for the ability to put the mouse over the image gallery and zoom the image there. It’s arrived at last!

Note:

• Modifications were made to the product-gallery.php template to accommodate these new changes. Update your template overrides accordingly.

Fixed

• Addressed an issue in the WP Admin with field heights on fields making them not visible.
• Fixed channel site URL to update based on the “Site Address” setting, not the “WordPress Address” setting.
• Fixed options sorting order on select fields for admin settings sections.
• For several versions there’s been an erroneous check for Shipping, returning an error when shipping is either already set up, or should NOT be set up. This has been fixed.

Changes

• Added a new class to the product archive template title: bc-product-archive__title.
• Modified the names of the cart cookies for better compatibility with server/host restrictions. (i.e. Some hosts would remove BC cookies because they lacked a wp- prefix)
• Better error handling around 0 qty field entries on cart items. The ajax response would leave the 0 in the field but would continue to show the previous price value. Entering 0 does not delete an item from your cart so we’ve updated this to return the field value to its previous value.

Conclusion

That’s all for now! Follow CHANGELOG.md for our complete list of updates and we’ll see you here in a few weeks for the latest batch of new features!