New Release: BigCommerce for WordPress 3.2.0

This week, we’re excited to announce the release of the latest plugin version, 3.2.0.

This release includes some exciting new features related to channels and the ability to place pieces of product data and purchasing options in specific places.

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.

New Features

New onboarding instructions

Upon completion of the onboarding process, there’s a list of instructions that indicate next steps, reducing the chance for confusion on the part of the installer.

Variant Images

Now when you choose a variant from the product options, the main image changes to match the variation chosen. This was an often requested feature from merchants who have used it on their existing BigCommerce storefronts. Thanks everyone for the requests!

Pre-order and Non-purchasable products

Pre-order and non-purchasable product availability settings in BigCommerce are now respected and properly rendered on the WordPress side. Pre-order products have a button and non-purchasable products do not. There are new Customizer options for the labels for both of these types of products.

Hidden Prices

You may now have products with hidden prices, and instead print something like “Call 555–1234 for pricing”.

As part of this update, there’s now a template for the sku component of a product: components/products/product-hidden-price.php.

New Shortcode/Block Component options

In 3.1 we released the ability to pass an argument to the shortcode or Gutenberg block to only print a fragment of a product, like title, or description. In this new released of 3.2 you can now also render only a Buy Now button. Additionally, if variations are required for purchase those extra fields appear as well.

Channel Select in Page / Post Editor Product Selection Flow

Before 3.2 in WordPress you would only see the products you select in the page / post editor as they were on your primary channel (typically, what you connected first to BC4WP). Now the shortcode/block wizard lists all available channels and you can choose a channel and then list products from that specific channel. This helps a great deal with multilingual/currency sites.

Improved Customer Group Hook

Before 3.2 the bigcommerce/customer/group_id hook would not be triggered if the shopper wasn’t logged in. We’ve changed this so it fires for customers and shoppers that are not logged in, so you can build logic that takes into account your default customer group settings, like which categories to make visible.

Fixed

• Fixed import of product descriptions containing HTML links. WordPress core was adding noopener attributes prematurely, breaking the JSON data stored in the queue.
• Fixed a fatal error when updating to version 3.0+ from 2.2.1 or earlier while a product import is in progress.

Changed

• Pass through custom error messages from the API when Add to Cart fails. Previously we were returning null and using a generic message. We’re still using the generic message but only when a more specific message is not available from the API.
• The template components/products/product-gallery.php has changed to accommodate variant images.
• The template components/products/product-form.php has a new variable $message containing the pre-order message to display for the product.
• The bigcommerce/customer/group_id filter will be called from \BigCommerce\Accounts\Customer::get_group_id(), even when the current user is logged out or does not have a customer ID.
• Removed the bigcommerce/pricing/currency_code filter. The pricing API request will now derive the value from the bigcommerce_currency_code option.

Deprecated

• The post_id field in the bc_reviews table is no longer used and will be removed in a future release.

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!