How do I update WooCommerce template files in my theme? [closed]

WordPress beginner here – my site seems to have some outdated template files which I think are the cause of some functionality issues the site is experiencing.

Particularly, there are bundled outdated template files for the plugin WooCommerce. As far as I can tell, this is a fairly common problem for this plugin and they’ve even created a ‘system status’ page to show you exactly which template files are out of date.

Looking at this system status, I can clearly see that the template file ‘variable.php’ is out of date. This matches a problem I’m having where items aren’t being added to the cart.

Now I’m fairly new to WordPress but if I understand right from this article, these template files are just that – templates. They’re all the same with slight revisions in each version, and I need to copy the actual contents over from my variable.php file over to the newly updated variable.php.

But then the article goes on to say this:

“If you’ve found templates that are outdated you need to copy over the new templates to your theme and then make any changes you made to the previous template to this new template.”

I’ve found the templates that are outdated, but where do I find these ‘new’ updated templates? Is there an online resource that specializes in updating these files? If I’m right about how this works, this question should be easy. If I’m not, please correct me.

The outdated files are in your theme’s woocommerce folder (unless the theme has stored them elsewhere, but that is the default). You don’t need this folder per se and can rename it (which is the more temporary way than flat-out deleting it) and WooCommerce will work. If you purchased the theme you could also contact their support and see about purchasing an upgrade because if the theme has been updated for compatibility.

If there were important customizations in your templates then begins the super-fun job of comparing the old templates to the new ones (which are in the plugin WooCommerce’s templates folder).

When WooCommerce 2.0 was released I had to save a client site whose checkout process was totally broken by outdated theme templates. The original theme people had copied all of the WooCommerce templates in lieu of just the ones they wanted to modify. In the end I removed all but maybe 3 of the override templates.