1 Thing to Do Before Updating to WooCommerce 2.1

WooCommerce 2.1 has arrived with some great new features and upgrades. My favorite so far, is the redesigned back-end. But there’s a few things I haven’t had a chance to look at yet, that sound really great. Before you go clicking that update button, make sure to back everything up, so you can roll-back if anything goes wrong.

I just wanted to point out one thing I’ve seen on every site I’ve upgraded so far: the WooCommerce Widgets have changed, such that WP will remove them from your widget areas on upgrade. In my experience, they don’t even move to “Inactive Widgets”, they’re just gone, because they don’t exist in the same way they once did. There’s a new version of the widgets, but you’ll have to go and re-add them to your widget areas and re-configure each.

I recommend just expanding all your widget areas under Appearance>Widgets. Then expand each of the WooCommerce widgets, so you can see the settings. Finally, use a screenshot tool like FireShot to take a screenshot of the entire page. Save that somewhere, then you can easily use it as a reference to re-place all your WooCommerce widgets after updating to WooCommerce 2.1 (now 2.1.1).

If you get into trouble, there’s a bunch of resources at develop.woothemes.com/woocommerce and you can also get support on the WooCommerce WordPress.org support forum.