New Release: BigCommerce for WordPress 3.6.0 and 3.7.0

BigCommerce for WordPress 3.6.0 did not get a public release, so its changes were rolled into 3.7.0.

This release adds some pretty cool under-the-hood features that have been requested for quite some time. Currency changes, alt tags, SEO changes and more!

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

Password Synchronization
When a WordPress user’s password is updated using the password reset form, that change is synchronized to BigCommerce, assuming that user is marked for password synchronization.

Abandoned cart recovery
Visitors who have given an email address but abandoned the cart will get an email with a link to the cart. When they click it, it takes them back to the website with the cart re-instantiated.

New routes to WordPress pages
Previously there were a number of instances, particularly in email, where links would direct the customer to the BC store, rather than the WordPress site. We’ve now added new route configurations to point BigCommerce-generated links to pages on the WordPress site:

• create_account points to the user registration page
• forgot_password points to the lost password page
• account_order_status points to the order history page
• account_new_return points to the shipping & returns page
• recover_abandoned_cart points to the cart recovery endpoint

Currency Settings
A currency selection area has been added to the Settings area. Any enabled currency on the BigCommerce backend will be available in WordPress. If the WordPress site is running in multi-channel mode, each channel can have its own currency.

Custom SEO Titles and Descriptions
The SEO title set in the BigCommerce admin will override the HTML title tag for the product single. The SEO description set in the BigCommerce admin will be used to render a meta description tag in the page header. NOTE: Read full changelog on how to use the forthcoming Yoast For BigCommerce plugin.

Image alt Tags
When adding an image in BigCommerce, the contents of the Description field will be used as that image’s alt tag content in WordPress.

Exposing the Cart ID to Javascript
It’s now possible to access the customer’s Cart ID via Javascript. This allows for a wide variety of UI customizations with Javascript. The Javascript method is bigcommerce_config.cart.getCartID();

Fixed

• Fixed several locations where “bigcommerce” was misspelled as “bigcomerce” in text domains, HTML classes, and filter names.

Changed

• If a user account is configured to sync with BigCommerce but the customer ID user meta is missing (as may happen if the BigCommerce plugin has been uninstalled and reinstalled), a matching customer account may be found by email and used for password validation.
• On uninstall of the plugin, pages related to the plugin will have “-uninstalled” appended to their slugs when they are set to draft. If the plugin is reinstalled later and these pages still exist, they will be republished and “-uninstalled” will be removed from the slugs.
• If a product variant has an image, and that variant is added to the cart, the cart page will display that variant’s image instead of the default product image.

Removed

• Currency formatting settings have been removed. Formatting settings are pulled from the BigCommerce currencies API. PHP’s intl extension will still be used for formatting if it is available.

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!