On today’s episode we’re going to talk about the brand new version of WooCommerce, code name Zippy Zebra right here on Your Website Engineer podcast, episode number 289.

Hello, everybody. Welcome back to another episode of Your Website Engineer podcast. My name is Dustin Hartzler. Today we will be talking about Zippy Zebra, the brand new version of Woo Commerce. That’s version 2.6. We’ll get to that in just a couple minutes. I’ve got a small announcement I guess. The only thing that I wanna share with you that’s happening in the WordPress space is WordCamp Europe is happening next weekend. That’s gonna be happening in Austria, Vienna, Austria, and more than 2,200 attendees are gonna be flying in from all over the world. I’m a volunteer there so I’m getting some information about it behind the scenes and all that good stuff because it is just less than ten days away. And it looks like there’s about 200 to 300 people from Austria that will be joining WordCamp Europe and then everybody else is from tons of different countries all around the world.

So this is my very first big WordCamp where we’re like – continental WordCamp. I’ve never been to WordCamp U.S. or Europe before and since I’m already here in Spain it was just – it made sense to head on over to Austria. I’m a little concerned that – it looks like there is some flights that may be canceled or delayed due to some air strikes in France, so hopefully all of my flights – even though they’re not flying through France or anything, that they will be okay and I’ll get there. So if you are coming to WordCamp Austria, send me a message and let me know. I’d love to meet up. I’ll be there Thursday through Sunday next weekend.

So that’s what’s happening in the WordPress space I think. I mean, WordPress, the next version of WordPress, WordPress 4.6, is still under development. It’s still in the early stages and so there’s not a lot of information going on and not a lot for me to share with you or even in demos to check out or things like that. So that’s about all that’s happening in this space this week when it comes to WordPress. So let’s move right on over to there – is there a plugin for that section.

Today the plugin that I wanna talk to you about is called Client Dash and it is a plugin that helps you create a more intuitive admin interface for your clients. And so I know that I had a webinar about this with Kyle Maurer a few years ago and how to go in and change some settings, make it different, make it easier for people to…to go in and just customize the admin dashboard and make it easier for people to use. This is actually their plugin. It is one that allows you to reorder all menu items, or you can rearrange menu items, you can remove menu items. And what I mean by that is in the WordPress dashboard down the left hand side you can maybe move posts to underneath pages and you can rename posts and you can call those like blogger, you can do all that good stuff.

The biggest change that they’ve made in this plugin is the dashboard widget manager. And it basically will allow you to remove all of the default widgets from your dashboard and make it very, very simple. There’s big buttons that you can add so you can easily go in and you can help your clients navigate to the right section. So maybe if they’re – the three most important things that they do on their website is add testimonials, maybe add a gallery, and add a new blog post. You can add three big buttons so they can go automatically there, right from the WordPress dashboard. So this is a neat plugin. It just recently got updated. It has more than 3,000 active installs.

And again, this was by my friend Kyle Maurer and Joel Worsham. They finally got an update for this plugin. So go ahead and check out Client Dash if you are inclined to customize the dashboard and just make it a better experience or remove some of those menu items you don’t want your clients to play around with and mess up on their website. You can find that in the WordPress directory just by searching Client Dash or our link will be in the show notes for episode number 289.

All right, let’s see. Let’s go right into the Zippy Zebra. All of WooCommerce updates have a little code name, this one is called Zippy Zebra and there are quite a few changes that happened since WooCommerce 2.5. And so let’s just kind of go through and we’re going to just dive in real quick. The very first one is shipping zones have been added and it gives you much more flexibility out of the box. WooCommerce comes with the ability to ship and charge for shipping with a few different methods.

So you could have a flat rate shipping, so you’d say I want all of my products to go out and I’m just gonna charge $5.00 a flat rate for shipping. They also have local pickup, which is usually free to people who can come to your web shop and pick up their product. They have local delivery, which can be activated based on a zip code range. And you can say I’ll do local delivery for $25.00 up to ten miles away or whatever. You can do free shipping and then there’s an international flat rate. So if you wanted to have – you know, it was gonna be $25.00 to ship to Canada you could do that as well.

Well, now there’s something called shipping zones and this looks a lot like the Table Rate Shipping plugin that I’d say is a premium plugin from WooThemes. And it basically gives you the ability to go in and set up different shipping zones. So say, for example, I’m in Ohio and I don’t wanna deal with, like, trying to customize the – using like a FedEx plugin or a USPS plugin and having data pulled in and just having different shipping amounts for all different things. Maybe it’s too big of a headache to try to manage all that. Maybe I wanna say that anybody that’s living in Ohio I wanna charge them $3.00 shipping and then anybody that’s in the surrounding states around Ohio I can configure it and say all of those states it’s going to be $10.00 shipping. And then if you are anywhere else in the United States, except for Alaska and Canada, maybe that’ll be $15.00 shipping. And then if you wanna go to those two states that aren’t part of the continental U.S. maybe that will be $35.00. And you can specify exactly what their shipping costs are gonna be. So it makes it super nice.

Now one of the features that’s – that the Table Rate gives, which is an additional premium plugin, but you can specify things even further so you can say, oh, if somebody lives in this particular zone, maybe it’s the Ohio zone, if they order less than four of these products it’s only going to ship and it’s going to be $3.00. But if they purchase four or they purchase five, six, or seven of these, it’s going to be double that or it’s only gonna be one and a half times that. So you can do a lot of really cool things with the combination between the two.

But with the new Table Rate Shipping, you have some easy ability to go in and add “flat rates” to different regions and zones. So you can do them as low as a zip code, so maybe you can say your local zip code you’ll ship for free or you can say the entire continent of Europe, I’m going to ship there for one price as well. So that’s pretty nice and it’s going to add a lot of flexibility and a lot more options when it comes to shipping areas, shipping requirements, shipping – ways that you can ship your things out of WooCommerce without having to purchase any expensive add-ons. So that is one of the biggest new features of WooCommerce 2.6.

Another thing that you’ll see, there’s some small improvements that you’ll see, but we also fixed the performance and options for the layered navigation widget. And so you can select specific attributes to filter out products that don’t fit their needs. So maybe if you have all of your products and somebody’s looking for blue and they’re looking for size – or they’re looking for the color blue and maybe they’re looking it from a certain category, like a shirt or something, like you can set those and it’ll filter out all of the other – any product that does not meet those specs, they will be filtered out. They also have added a product rating filter so if you wanted to be able to filter your store by everything that has a five-star review, you can do that now as well.

Now one of the coolest features and this is just a small little tweak, and I love it, is the way that they’ve incorporated some Ajax into the checkout process. So before when you added a coupon code, if you offer coupons for your store somebody would have to put a coupon code in, they’d have to hit enter, and then the whole page would refresh and then it would say whether or not the coupon was valid. Now with using some magic of Ajax you can add the coupon, you hit the apply button, and that whole page will automatically update. You don’t have to – it doesn’t reload, it just – that one little section of the page now updates, which is really, really nice.

Now that also goes to the fact like if you wanna add one or two more things to your cart, or if there’s things already in your cart and you wanna add, oh, maybe I want two of these instead of one of these, it does the exact same thing. It auto refreshes right on the inside of the page. If you wanna remove something from your cart no more page reloads, which is really, really nice. It’s just like small, little subtle things like that’s like, why haven’t we been doing this all along? It just makes sense that – you know, it makes it that much easier.

Another thing that’s been changed in WooCommerce 2.6 is the My Account page. It’s been made much easier to navigate, it’s more organized by adding a tab design and so now by tabs there’s on the left hand side you can now see your orders dashboard, downloads, addresses, payment methods, account details. And again, this is all if people have created an account within your WooCommerce store. So, a lot of times customers – or a lot of times people will set up their store and say, “Hey, I want you to log in so you have an account on my website.” And then that way they can see their invoices, they can see all of that stuff, they can manage their addresses where they wanna ship things and stuff like that. So, the My Account page has been completely overhauled, which works really, really nice.

Another thing that’s been changed is now Stripe and PayPal are both available through the onboarding widget. So if you’re setting up WooCommerce for the very first time it will give you the ability to set up PayPal standard or Stripe, kind of built in in the same – just on the welcome, walking through screens. So when WooCommerce is set up for the very first time you get to specify your pages that you’re gonna use, you’re gonna set up where your store’s located, you’ll set up what shipping method you want, or if you want tax and the tax rates, you’ll set up the payments page and that will give you the ability to choose whether you want PayPal, put it on Stripe, whether you wanna accept checks as payment, if you wanna do bank transfers or do a cash on delivery. So those options are now built in and if you are already using WooCommerce, now you can go to the add-on section and you can add PayPal as well as a free extension that allows you to accept payments from your website.

So those are some things that you’ll start to see when it comes to looking at WooCommerce. They’ve changed the icon that’s next to products, like a lot of small, little changes and it just incrementally is getting better, incrementally it’s getting much easier to sell things on your WordPress site, and it’s really exciting to see where we’re going. There’s more and more plugins that are going from the paid versions to a free version and it just is really nice to see the effort of the team. It’s nice also because since I am on a WooCommerce support team I get to test out some of the stuff. And for the longest time it’s like, oh, that’s not in 2.5? Like I was – been troubleshooting and testing and almost recommending things that you can do with the new version of WooCommerce that just came out yesterday. And so I had to kind of remember like, oh, yeah, there’s some things that I get to see in running the betas of this stuff that’s not actually out there.

There’s a lot more – there’s goodies in there for developers if you’re interested, but the payment token, API, has now been – it’s been updated so you can store, manipulate, and retrieve payment information through a standardized way. And the API is now based on the WP rest API, which is nice as well. So there’s a lot of technical specs over on the WooCommerce development blog. And so if you want all these features, you just have to upgrade to WooCommerce 2.6. You can do it right from your dashboard; it’s just a quick, easy, click to install update. And there are – WooCommerce is completely open source so if you find any bugs you can head on over to the get hub bug tracker or the issue tracker and you can mention something there. There’s a team that’s there, they’re monitoring things for the next week just to make sure that there’s no big issues when it comes to WooCommerce 2.6.

So that’s what I wanted to share with you today. If you’re not using WooCommerce, then this might be a good time to start as WooCommerce is super nice and has some really nice functionality. Makes it really easy. Even if you want to just sell something digitally, you know, maybe you’re selling services, maybe you’re a coach or consultant, there’s a lot that you can do with WooCommerce that doesn’t have anything to do with shipping physical goods. You can do all digital things, you can sell eBooks, you can do all kinds of stuff, all with the power of WooCommerce. Plus, with these new payment gateways, Stripe and PayPal being free, you can set up a store, you don’t have to ship anything physical and you can accept payments without – it’s not gonna cost you any money because WooCommerce is a free plugin. So if you have interest in that go ahead and check out WooCommerce 2.6.

And that’s really what I wanted to share with you today. I’ve still got a couple weeks left here on my European vacation. We’ve been here more than four weeks, which is hard to believe. And so I’m actually recording this podcast in the kitchen of our little apartment at 6:00 in the morning while everybody else is sleeping and just trying to get this thing done and recorded. Next week, like I said, I’ll be at WordCamp Europe. I’m actually spending a day in Madrid next week to co-work with some employees and then I’ll be home, then I’ll be home for a few days and going to Podcast Movement and then I’ve got another work trip at Berlin. So, a lot of travel in the next couple of weeks. So, it’s gonna be the end of summer before I really get settled down, which is really, really crazy.

So thank you so much for your support, thanks for listening and hanging out even though these episodes are not the highest of quality when it comes to recording, but I wanted to make sure that you are informed and stay updated to what’s going on in the WordPress space each and every week. So with that, I am going to wrap this thing up and we’ll talk again soon. Take care. Bye-bye