I got an email today from a local developer who was asking me some questions about the recent WooCommerce 2.1 update. When she updated she got an error related to her shipping methods. With a quick search she was able to discover our recently created WooCommerce 2.1 Issues pageΒ which mentions a fix for that error:
…You can delete that specific file from your theme until this issue has been patched by your theme developer for a temporary fix.
The problem is that in this case she's the developer. She created a custom theme for her client and she has to figure out exactly which template has changed and how to change it back. The question is how? What is a more permanent fix?
Checking the Version of Template Files
WooCommerce Template Version Number
The easiest way to check this is to open up the template file in woocommerce -> templates -> {template name} and compare the @version number to the @version number in your overridden file located in your theme: your-theme -> woocommerce -> {template name}. If the version numbers are different then you'll have to update that template.
Update Your Template Files
If you've found templates that are outdated you need to copy over the new templates to your theme and then make any changes you made to the previous template to this new template.
We're aware that doing this can be time consuming. That's why we try not to change our templates. However, sometimes, it's wise to break backwards compatibility.
Let's Do This Automatically!
WooCommerce Template Overrides in the System Status
Since this is a bit of a tedious process we thought it best to add this functionality into our System Status. As of WooCommerce 2.1.1 (which should come out tomorrow) you should have any outdated templates highlighted in the System Status.
Hopefully that explains a how you can update your theme to work with WooCommerce 2.1! Happy updating!
Thank you for your suggestion π
Hi,
I’ve searched google for it.
But I recently updated one “WooCommerce” shop to version 2.1 – and the issue is related with “Related products”.
I also read few articles about dropping the “tags” relation? I’m not sure, maybe my issue is related to that.
Anyway I checked the template versions and both are at 1.6.4 (In plugins & themes folder).
But somehow the products are showing but not in any relation to the “tags”, everywhere are the same related products.
Silver
Hi Silver,
This isn’t a known issue and I haven’t seen this in the support queue. If you’re a WooThemes customer I would open up a ticket. If not – I would disable all plugins / themes and make sure it’s not a conflict.
Hi again,
I’m not WooThemes customer, but I use WooCommerce for the e-commerce of WordPress.
Tried your approach, disabling plugins / themes, didn’t help.
I also have a working and non-working version:
WooCommerce 2.0.20 – working
WooCommerce 2.1.1 – not working
What if you or some takes a look? Whether it’s a plugins problem, or my theme related problem.
Hey Silver,
Sorry, I wish I knew what was going on. I have plenty of projects right now so I can’t take the time to fix your site. π
My advice would be to purchase a WooCommerce extension so you can get access to our support. Sorry I wish I had a better solution for you.
Okay, no problem.
Guess I will go with the older version for now, and see what’s gonna happen with new WooCommerce versions.
Hi,
Thanks for this. Sorry how and where do I “copy over the new templates to your theme” – I am brand new to WooCommerce as of a week ago although pretty efficient around websites.
Appreciate your help,
Sam
Hi Sam,
Copy over the templates from the WooCommerce
templatesdirectory into thewoocommercedirectory in your theme. You only have to copy over the outdated templates you don’t have to copy over the entire folder. Does that make sense?Thanks a million!! You provided the solution to my problem.
I was struggeling with the “form-login.php” but in the end it turned out that there were 2 of them if different directories. But after that my webshop was up-and-running again…. Thanks!
Yes thank you. Done done and done. Great π
Hi- How do I “copy them over” ? Do I have to have two browser windows open or something? Where do I even find these files please? Thanks!
I’m not exactly surre how to do what you just said. Is the template for woocommerce in the system status under “templates”? and then where do I find the woocommerce directory in my theme, which is “X”.
I can see in the report which are listed as “outdated” even though all my themes and plugins are up to date.
It’s causing me an error in my cart among other things.
@Chrystal, which stack?
whoah Chrystal. You’re using very (Very, VERY) outdated copies of The X Theme from Kyle and the crew over at ThemeCo. http://prntscr.com/74k9vc There’s a HUGE likelihood that nothing will work correctly unless you update ALL of your themes and plugins.
Where is the answer to that question!?
I have the same problem… anyone!?
Hi I recently updated my wordpress and woo-commerce and now my whole webshop is down. All i see is:
Fatal error: Class ‘WooCommerce_Widget_Cart’ not found in /home/bjornek117/domains/meneertabak.nl/public_html/wp/wp-content/themes/wpflexishoptwo/functions/function-woocommerce.php on line 28
I’m using : WooCommerce 2.0.20.
and WordPress 3.8.1 with thema: WP FlexiShop Two Child.
will it help if I update…or should i hire someone to fix this problem. I don’t want to make the it worse :S
Hi Bjorn, I would make a backup and then do the update. The error looks like it’s originating in your theme so I would contact the theme developer.
@Bjorn – did you get this sorted, I’ve got all sorts of issues too with the same theme.
Hi Patrick,
Apologies if I’m being stupid here, but where do you get the updated files from ?
I’ve downloaded the latest WooCommerce updates and my theme update and everything is version 1.6.4.
I’ve checked the Woocommerce folder both in and out of the themes folder, and its the same.
Where would I get the latest versions from ?
Hi Steve – the newest files will be located in the templates folder in the WooCommerce plugin. Go to your system status and check to see if there are any out of date templates.
Hi Patrick,
I’m using the theme SuperStore – Theme Version: 1.0.8 – from WooThemes.
When I updated to version 2.1.2 WooCommerce, the pages of Tags, Product Categories and widgets stopped working.
What can I do?
That version of Superstore is 9 months old! If you look through the changelog v1.1.0 has support for WooCommerce 2.1. Update that and those issues should go away. π
Awesome post! So helpful! Have you come across a random ‘flat rate free’ shipping option in the standard shipping options at checkout?
Since my update it’s just appeared from no-where and I can’t figure out where it came from? π
Hey Dani, that isn’t a known issue. It sounds like you have Flat Rate Shipping enabled and you don’t have any costs set up so it’s defaulting to free. You should be able to just turn it off.
Thanks, hmm I’m not sure. Is that hiding somewhere other then the woocommerce shipping page? That’s what I thought might of happened but my flat rates are enabled and my standard rates are still there, enabled and also appear in the drop down options on check out like before the update, except now there is a flat rate (free) option appearing as default at check out. It was all working great before update. Do you know of anyone who can help me suss it out? thanks for your help!
We have a list of affiliated WooWorkers. π
http://www.woothemes.com/affiliated-woo-workers/
I hope that helps! π
We updated to this latest version, and are running SuperStore (that says its also the latest version), but all of a sudden, several Woocommerce plugins are no longer functioning and have caused our shop to stall out on orders; Cart Reports and Minimum Advertising Pricing are the “suspect” plugins, which we’ve disabled. Also odd is we now keep being logged out when in the Admin panel, having the sign back in repeatedly. Would love/appreciate some guidance. Love your products.
Hey Deb, I’v personally used Minimum Advertising Pricing on several sites post 2.1 and it works fine. We haven’t heard of any issues with Cart Reports either. It’s unlikely to be those products. The best idea here is to setup a test site with just those plugins active and see if the issue persists. If so, contact support and we’ll help you get to the bottom of it. π
Thanks, Patrick. Giving that suggestion and roll and hopefully won’t be in touch π
Hello Patrick,
I’m in my FTP files and found the different files/folders to update, but I cannot copy the files I select from the template folder to the woocommerce theme folder. Should I cut/paste?
Hey Valerie,
Why not just delete the outdated templates? And then if you need your page to look a certain way copy the templates out of the WooCommerce template directory and start customizing those? Just make sure to back everything up before you make any changes. π
I just updated to the new version of woocommerce and now my simple product option is the only one that works when i do a variation product the sku and attrubutes shows and the add to cart button but the prices doesn’t and when i click add to cart it doesn’t add the product to the cart i do have some out dated files listed below
archive-product.php version – is out of date. The core version is 2.0.0,
cross-sells.php version – is out of date. The core version is 1.6.4,
content-product.php version – is out of date. The core version is 1.6.4,
content-single-product.php version – is out of date. The core version is 1.6.4,
product-image.php version – is out of date. The core version is 2.0.14,
product-thumbnails.php version – is out of date. The core version is 2.0.3,
related.php version – is out of date. The core version is 1.6.4,
title.php version – is out of date. The core version is 1.6.4,
up-sells.php version – is out of date. The core version is 1.6.4,
single-product.php version – is out of date. The core version is 1.6.4,
taxonomy-product_cat.php version – is out of date. The core version is 1.6.4,
taxonomy-product_tag.php version – is out of date. The core version is 1.6.4
but there has to be a work around or a hack because copying the new files may break my site and we get orders
every day we can’t afford to try and copy every file and try to program around it
This is why we always suggest making a backup first! Try setting up a test site. Something like test.yoursitename.com or yoursitename.com/test/. Then you can update your template files on the test site and then push them live when everything is working.
Good Evening,
I am using Avada theme from Themeforest.
My cart won’t complete. I proceed to checkout, fill in Billing Address and click continue and that is as far as it goes. No further than continue. Do you know why?
ο»Ώ
If you can assist, that would be great as I have been searching and searching and can not find the answers.
Thank you in advance.
Cheers
Scott
It could very well be a theme issue. Have you tried seeing if you can checkout in Twenty Twelve? If you can then it’s definitely a theme issue and you should reach out to the developer.
Hi, Scott! I too am using Avada thru ThemeForest and I’m having the same problem only nothing will add to my cart. Were you able to resolve the issue? If so, how? I’m becoming desperate. My web developer who purchased the theme has taken the money and run. Thank you.
Hi Patrick,
It might be a good idea to tell people to make sure they keep their old templates before just overwriting them with the new templates.
I’ve been asked to fix a couple of sites now who have just done what you suggested and having the old template files would at least give me a clue what someone had previously done to customise the look of a Woocommerce site.
Can you add something to tell people to maybe rename the old files in the theme Woocommerce directory before putting in the new ones?
Thanks
Paul
Thanks for this Paul! It is always a good idea to make a backup before any change. I figured most users who do this purchased a theme from a vendor and they can redownload it. Either that or they customized their theme themselves and they would know to make a backup.
I have updated the WooCommerce, Everything was fine but there was a notice in the System Status of WooCommerce that my theme is using older version of WooCommerce.
Now, theme structure has changed a lot. Some sidebars are missing. SHOP page has changed its width and images are very very big.
I can restore files from my Backup but thats not what I want.
If I copy only code from the backup files and paste that code to the subsequent WooCommerce files in the theme directory. Will that work?
How Woocommerce checks the files version? From file’s name, comments or code?
Any comments will be appreciated.
For your Information ::
I am using “barberry” theme and WordPress 3.9
Hey Ali,
I wouldn’t mix and match old theme files with new theme files. I would definitely reach out to the author to see what the best way is to use the theme using WC 2.1.
Hi Patrick,
Thanks a lot for your reply.
BTW, My client needed that Warning to be handled and I couldnt wait for author’s update.
So, I have copied the backup of the theme and pasted the code in the subsequent new files in my theme directory. But there was a trick, I kept the top part of each file showing Woocommerce version number and file name etc as it was.
It worked fine and everything is running fine.
System Status now shows no warning.
Thanks for your this nice forum.
Regards
Ali
Thank you so much, Ali! I am having to repurchase the Avada theme and was waiting for an answer as to whether I could keep my old theme and just use the update. This whole thing has driven me insane – I’m not a techie and my cart wasn’t working so had to switch over to TwentyTwelve until I could get an answer on this.
Hopefully I’ll be able to do this myself since I’ve already spent so much on the web design who grabbed my money and then ran. If not, I’ll pass the info on to someone who knows what they are doing.
We always update our site via automatic updating in the plugins directory. But there are lots of template files that are not getting updated and the cart is no longer functioning. It’s easy to see which template files are out of date.
In your article you said “let’s do it automatically”, then you said we have to copy the files manually. This sounds misleading. If our website wasn’t updated with the files during the upgrade, then where do I get a copy of these files? Or where did they go? If the upgrade didn’t include them, then how do I get them?
Once I get the files, I don’t see any directory structure anywhere to copy files. Do I have to go to the plugin editor and manually copy the code into the code box for each file?
If you update WooCommerce all of the templates within WooCommerce will also be updated. The issue here is that a theme may want to make some customizations to a template. Since they’re customizations it would be silly to update them automatically since we have no idea what’s been changed (besides permission issues having a plugin update theme files). We can check for out of date templates automatically but moving the new templates over to your theme and reapplying the customizations to them will have to be manual.
If this is a premium theme your theme developer will have to update those templates for you. If you did these customizations yourself you’ll have to do that manual process.
To get your store up and running immediately I would suggest archiving those template overrides somewhere and then deleting the folder until you can reapply the template modifications to the new templates (or have a developer do it for you). At least this way your store is up and running.
Aaargh! This has been such a nightmare and has cost me a lot more money. I would have to repurchase the Avada theme yet no one can seem to tell me if it will completely overwrite all my settings. If so, I would have to rebuild my site myself as I’m unable to afford having someone design it a second time. Site works with the Twelve Twenty theme but it definitely does not look as professional as the Avada theme. WordPress/WooCommerce has been great. Only one at fault is the theme developer … would be nice if he/she/it would respond or at least made the update so it didn’t disable everyone’s shops but …..
Sadly I’m about ready to go back to GoDaddy just for the support aspect (w/o the necessity of spending $ every time there is an update) and knowing that their updates aren’t dependent a 3rd party theme developer who may or may not stay in the game. Figure I can keep the Twelve Twenty theme for the shop with its nice format and WooCommerce with its product options but link it thru a GoDaddy site and dump Avada.
Any other suggestions would be appreciated. Thanks Patrick and all the other contributors to this blog for your help.
Hey Karen,
Yeah – if you have a theme that overrides WooCommerce templates and doesn’t keep them up to date then you’re kinda stuck. π
I wish there was more I could do but honestly the best thing is to go with a theme developer you trust – one that will keep things up to date. The two other alternatives are to use a theme that doesn’t override any WooCommerce functionality or just delete all of your template overrides in your current theme.
I hope that helps! π
Thank you for responding in a timely manner. This is helpful and hopefully we find a solution without losing more time on the issue. We did all our testing in WP Engine’s testing environment, and it fails.
We’re using Avada theme. And those developers might be off enjoying their success, I’m not sure. But we started using it in 2013, adding WooCommerce in Jan 2014. So I don’t see that the Theme affected WooCommerce at all, since we added WooCommerce later. All of WooCommerce’s new updates after Jan just don’t work. Someone in our office accidentally updated the WooCommerce plugin, then clients were complaining they couldn’t check out. So using WP Engine we reverted to our previous day’s setup, which restored checkout functionality. We have new product launches almost every week and a lot of anticipating customers. One missing function in checkout kills our business and this month’s paycheck. There’s a lot of risk riding on this.
We did finally get our hands on the all of the files and directories. It appears that there are no checkout pages in the new post 2.1 versions. So on our testing environment if we upload the whole complete WooCommerce plugin by SFTP and override all the old files and leaving extraneous files including data, go back to the backend system it says that WooCommerce has not been updated. BUT, in WooCommerce it says that our templates are all updated! Woo! BUT #2, checkout still doesn’t work! Do we need to delete those old “pages” so that it functions with the new “endpoints”, or it doesn’t matter if they’re left there?
Finally, going back to the plugins page which still says we are not updated, hitting “update” puts us back with my first message above. Our templates are out of date again, and site functionality doesn’t work.
Really really appreciate your responses and understanding this further. We’re learning a lot from you.
Hey Mike,
I would definitely get rid of them.
Why does your theme need to override our templates? Most of our themes modify at most a couple templates – if any at all. If your site is working with Twenty Twelve then your theme has a broken template. If your developer isn’t updating it then I would suggest switching to a different theme.
Hi, Patrick, your answers give me so much help, thank you !
Hi perhaps off topic but I followed the standard WooCommerce protocol for overriding shop templates. Then when I upgraded to 2.12 those changes suddenly no longer take effect. The files are still there in my child theme, i.e. I still have the file “my-child/woocommerce/shop/wrapper-start.php” in my child theme, but the output is generated by “plugins/woocommerce/templates/shop/wrapper-start.php”
Have you heard of this before?
None of the templates should have changed in a bug fix branch like that. There must be something else going on.
I try to update an translation file but in an WP-Multisite with Domain-Mapping you can’t update the plugins.
I’m not an expert in multisite. I do know that only the network admin can update plugins for you. A subsite can’t do it individually. All sites must run the same plugins and the same versions of plugins.
Hi, thanks for all your information on this, it’s been helpful.
I’ve been going through and manually changing the outdated files, but there’s a few files I don’t know what to do with. For example, it says my /woocommerce/cart/cart.php file is out of date. I’ve gone to my custom template theme, and I can’t seem to even find that file in the folder. Any idea as to why this might be? Could I just copy the WooCommerce file over if that file doesn’t exist?
Wow that is a very weird problem. I haven’t ever seen that before. If there’s nothing in your theme then the file shouldn’t be outdated… because it doesn’t exist. Maybe is the file in a parent theme?
You could try copying the file in WooCommerce to your theme if that still doesn’t work. Bizarre.
Thanks for the suggestion.
I just updated to the latest version of WooCommerce but I am having some difficulty in updating the out-of-date templates. I have taken the template files from the plugin and placed them in the child them to replace the out dated ones but in the system settings it still shows as out of date and when I check the template file it is the correct version.
Any idea why they are not registering? I have also tried deleting them from the child theme but that also makes no difference. The old files are still being referenced.
Hey Andrew,
Something definitely isn’t right there. Are you sure you have the latest version of the plugin? If you have a local copy of your site for example are you sure the plugin that on your local machine is up to date?
Have you tried replacing both the parent and child theme templates? The child theme templates should be the only one that matters unless your theme is doing something funky and changing the way WooCommerce reads templates??
This is really something that the WooCommerce team should be more careful with… I’m a developer and I always create custom template for my client. Especially for the checkout / cart page which are (in my opinion) absolutely not good by default. But after each major WooCommerce update, I need to spend hours figuring why a payment method / a checkout button appear two times. It’s not portable at all…
Isn’t there a better way to do all that?
The only foolproof way would be to lock down the checkout experience. Hosted solutions like Shopify do this. It’s great because your site doesn’t break but you’re of course a lot more limited.
If you modify templates be prepared to check them all when you update to a new version just to make sure things go as planned.
A great way to do this is to use a difference checker (there are such sites online). Just plug in your custom template code, then the new template code, and it will highlight the difference for you.
Hello,
I have the Storefront theme by WooThemes on my site.
I have modified the Storefront theme, and modified the files; such as header.php, styles.css, pages.php and structure files.
But all my files replaced with original files after some time automatically. All modifications were lost. I don’t know how to stop updating the storefront theme files.
Do you have some suggestion or can help me please…
Regards
Gaurav…
Hi Gaurav,
You can modify your theme but then every time it updates you’ll lose those modifications.
The better option is to create a child theme.
Is there a way to stop auto updates?
Hey Gaurav,
There aren’t any automatic updates for themes. Something else must be going on.
thanks for the information about outdated templates, my question is if i update only outdated files which, what impact does it make on my website theme. i am afraid that do i have to redesign that particular page to adjust new updates?
For the most part any changes to template will just include extra HTML markup or classes for CSS. It’s unlikely you’ll have to redesign anything.
Hi Patrick,
I have an out of date template. All my plugins are up to date so what I gathered from this page is that I should do the update manually.
I am not a developer so a lot of what I read on this page sounded a little like Chinese… π
Could you maybe let me know where I could find the updated template? I am guessing I just need to go into my host site and change the file there?
Here is the message I have:
neighborhood/woocommerce/cart/cart.php version 2.3.0 is out of date. The core version is 2.3.8,Hi Emma,
If you have an out of date template that means that there’s something in your theme that’s out of date. It has nothing to do with the plugins you’re running.
It looks like you’re running a theme called Neighborhood is that right? In those theme files there’s a file that needs to be updated. I would reach out to the theme author to fix this.
I believe the exact file you’re looking for is here
https://github.com/woothemes/woocommerce/blob/master/templates/cart/cart.php
So, what you’ll want to do is look at the old and the new ones, and depending on your theme, you’ll need to see what …”chunks” (if-you-will) are in the current file vs. what is outdated & what customizations (if any) the theme author might have added.
Thanks Brad! π
I see A LOT of issues with this update. The one I have now, 2.1, is running fine.
I don’t have time for a lot of problems and system checks, chasing answers and fixing this and that. What happens if I choose not to update?
Hi Patti,
If you don’t keep your WordPress site up to date you will be hacked at some point. Maybe not tomorrow, maybe not next month, but at some point you will be hacked.
I hear you on being a business owner and wanting to work on your business not your website. I would suggest setting some time aside a couple times a year to do this. Create a backup and update all of your plugins and themes. Hopefully nothing goes wrong and if it does you have time to fix it.
FYI if a template it outdated that doesn’t mean your site will explode. It means the HTML on your site might not be perfectly optimized. Keep WooCommerce up to date for sure and fix the theme templates when you get the chance.
I hope that helps! π
For your site’s security I’ve unlinked your website in the comment.
Thank you. It does help. I found out the hard way about back up. Installing new plugins and somehow messed with a perma-link. oopsy π but i fixed it. Pretty quick on the uptake, and I always remember what I did when I am working in new territory.
I already got hacked, luckily all they did was block me from signing in as admin. Fairly easy fix.
The HTML worked once when I first built the site and hasn’t worked since. It would really great to figure out how to fix that!
I am a “if it ain’t broke don’t fix it” person. :\ Thanks for your advice. π
i am not able to update outdated file in woocommerce system status. i saw many site and following the same procedure but not updating.
please guide me .
and also problem with my fonts. Fonts icon is not coming.
http://www.red-triangles.co.uk
Thanks
Hi please could you give a step by step instructions on how to update a theme, i have read all the comments but still cant figure it out. Many thanks!
Hey Joel,
If you bought your theme from some place you should ask the theme developer to update it for you. Otherwise you’ll have to manually override any outdated templates in your theme. To do that you have to go into the WooCommerce plugin, grab the correct files, and put them in your theme. See here: http://docs.woothemes.com/document/template-structure/
If you’re not a developer you shouldn’t be doing this!
Nice posts, was getting a little frustrated getting the cart.php error too, using the Avada theme and WooCommerce. Anyways, one thing that needed to be made clear about overriding particular files was where the correct files were placed and where the new files needed to go. I replaced the cart.php file using FTP log in and working directly on the server. It worked o.k for me. Thought it may have been more difficult than that, but i may have just been lucky.
Thank you!
I like your theme. So so sexy!
Hi
i ma trying to update outdated theme in woocommerce template file but it is not updating.
I d`nt know why such problem is coming
Please anyone can help me .
Is there is any possibilities that woocommerce plugin is automatic remove.
Thanks
Hi there,
i am looking to obtain a new theme for my website. My current theme has been integrated with wocommerce. I have staging site set up of my live site (include woocommerce integration, however the plugins are off as there being used for the live one). When i adopted a new theme on the staging site my woo commerece pages still existed and everything seems to be working. I am wondering when i switch the live site over will there be some issues i should consider in terms of woo-commerece not being able function?