In the week where I published my first tutorial (or walk-through, whatever) on YouTube, we saw a lot of other WordPress news as well. Oh wait, what’s my tutorial about, you ask? Well, I’m glad you asked 😅! It’s about how to turn a WordPress site into a static version and then deploy that to Cloudflare Pages.
Anyway, there’s lots of other news as well. Let’s jump in, shall we? Right after we check out this week’s sponsor:
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This means less worrying about missed communications and more happy users engaging with your site. Exciting, right?
🗞️ Within WordPress News
Here’s what I saw happening this past week:
- Grid layouts inside the Block Editor were supposed to be included in WordPress 6.3, but with 6.5 out, they’re still not part of WordPress. Right now, you’ll have to be running the Gutenberg plugin if you want to use it. If you want to see it finally land in 6.6, please provide feedback on Estela Rueda’s post about the next grid experience!
- Now, I’ve made no secret of preferring to use FSE over any Page Builder. That said, my buddy Nathan is running the 7th edition of the Page Builder Summit which will be held in about one month. Go ahead and join the waiting list, if page builders are your thing.
- Updated my article on how to activate our new font library for Classic Themes with step 4.
- You’ve heard me talk about our new Interactivity API before here. Why? Well, it’s one of those work-transforming APIs we got with 6.5. But, if you haven’t been able to find the time yet to figure out what it is, and what you can do with it, check out this Interactivity API Showcase.
- Kyle van Deusen over at The Admin Bar published their WordPress Professionals survey. Covering 1144 respondents. LOTS of interesting insights there.
- One of the Hackathon teams at CloudFest were working on a project that allowed the registering of Custom Post Types in the WordPress Admin (as a native solution). Daniel Bachhuber published the results of this project on the WordPress.com blog this week.
Now… I’m not sure we should have this activated by default as that would clutter the database tremendously IMO. I mean, if we look at how tags and categories are misused, I’m sure this will potentially make it worse.
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Speaking of CloudFest, the full recap of the Hackathon 2024 has been published by Carole Olinger. Featuring many beautiful pictures taken by my son, Roan 😍.
- Building an app with WordPress as a data point? Consider this WordPress plugin that provides an API to retrieve Gutenberg content as structured JSON by WordPress VIP.
- Listen, did you know Gravity SMTP integrates beautifully with popular email providers, including SendGrid, Mailgun, Postmark, and Brevo? As well as detailed email tracking within the WordPress dashboard, displaying email status, send time, recipient email addresses, plugin source, and more? Well, now you do!
- The next Developer Hours session is scheduled for the 30th of April. In it, one of the other neat APIs WordPress 6.5 brought us will be discussed; the Block Bindings API. You will need to RSVP.
- Joost de Valk was on the Freemius podcast discussing a great many topics that are interesting for product owners, developers, and businesses in general. Great episode!
Speaking of Joost, his super cool AAA Option optimizer plugin is live!
- Struggling with tabindex in web design? Step up your UI/UX game and avoid common pitfalls with the A11y Collective’s guide on effective tab order.
- I’m getting more and more questions about when Scanfully will finally open up Early Access. And… we’re getting very close! Our website also got a newly designed frontpage that explains much better what we’re going to do with Scanfully. Check it out!
- Anders Noren released a gorgeous new theme called Vermeer.
- The Gender Equality Survey aims to understand the gender equality landscape in WordPress business. This is for everyone to fill out.
- A new proposal aims to remove the non-block editor because of the widespread block editor adoption. Only 0.4% of users utilize non-block editor, leading to extra maintenance and bug potential.
- Nice to see the WordPress London meetups are happening regularly again. Always have seen this as the best excuse for a long weekend London 😏
🚀 Performance & Security
- With great power comes great responsibility. And with that in mind, I loved seeing this blog published on WordPress.org: How WordPress Is Creating a Faster Web.
- Friend of the Within WordPress Podcast Jonny Harris talked about WordPress Performance with Blackfire. Hiiiighly recommend you check this one out.
My favorite performance optimizing tools in WordPress:
- The best Front-end optimization plugin
- Cleaning up WordPress + script manager
- Cloud based performance optimizations
🔆 Within WordPress Highlight
The Pattern Directory got a refresh and is now powered by blocks! With this update, the site is now using a block child theme and the shared WordPress.org parent theme, laying the groundwork for future improvements.
For now, the main changes were to convert everything to blocks and standardize the layout, typography, and colors. Rosetta sites (for example, de.wordpress.org/patterns, or es.wordpress.org/patterns) have also been updated to use the new design.
💡 Interesting Finds
- In a previous edition I’ve mentioned Raycast as an alternative to Alfred. If you haven’t played with Raycast just yet, have a look at Sridhar Katakam’s blog post where he talks in-depth about it.
🎁 Bonus
A while back I talked 🎙️ to Patricia Brun Torre on the Within WordPress Podcast. We talked a lot about WordCamps (Europe) and of course GatherPress. This plugin aims to entirely remove the WordPress Project’s dependency on Meetup. Great conversation and lots to learn here
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