The last couple of months it truly feels like we’ve all stepped it up a notch when it comes to learning how to use WordPress better. This week’s edition of your Within WordPress newsletter is again chockfull of tutorials, learnings, insights, and more!
Let’s jump right in, and I hope you enjoy it!
🗞️ Within WordPress News
Here’s what I saw happening this past week:
- My good friend Jamie Marsland has been having some interesting “battles” over on his YouTube channel. He facilitates two different developers/designers to build a design he presents to them live. They then have to figure out how to build it. It’s a great format and we’ve seen a few very interesting battles already:
There’s more than one hero of mine there. There’s so much to learn on how to approach a build with FSE themes. HIGHLY recommended.
- Speaking of learning someone else build a FSE themed site, Jessica Lyschik, who helped build our default TT4 theme, demonstrated how to bring a site alive as well.
- Anne-Mieke Bovelett is really on a roll with her articles lately. She published “Is there life after page builders” as a person who switched away from Elementor to FSE.
- For next week’s Within WordPress podcast I’m featuring Alex Standiford and we talk a lot about his upcoming Affiliate plugin. Which, in my book, is a total game changer. For that product Alex had to build a Knowledge Base and he documented building the documentation. Quite meta, but also quite fun to read.
- There’s a proposal for a different approach for the Hosting Directory on .org published on Make WordPress Hosting by my amigo Javier.
I’m still forming an opinion here.
- Ionut Neagu has been on the acquiring path lately for WordPress plugins, and he recently shared more insights about the whole process on his blog.
- Jonathan Bossenger, Learn WordPress teacher, shared how to configure PHPCS for WPCS on the Mac with PHP 8.3.
- Brian Coords is trying real hard to be mentioned in my newsletter every single week, and I’m here for it! In this week’s mention, he shared an article called Gutenberg Dialogues and Monologues. It’s about the challenges and criticisms of Gutenberg, the WordPress block editor.
Well worth your time to read. It’s a story of recognizing where we are, what’s wrong, and what’s next.
- WooCommerce is launching a Coming Soon mode soonish. Get in on the testing and share your feedback. It’s needed.
Because that’s how it works.
- Listen, did you know that Gravity SMTP supports custom SMTP and API-based services and allows for easy toggling between connected email services to select the most suitable provider? Well, now you do.
- Devin Walker‘s wonderful WP Rollback celebrated 300K active installs this week. Quite the achievement, and a wonderful plugin at that. It allows you to rollback (or forward) any WordPress.org-hosted plugin or theme. The most common use case is when new updates create a conflict between your theme or another plugin.
🚀 Performance & Security
- I don’t know about you, but I spend a lot of time in the Inspector. Specifically the Chrome Inspector. So, whenever it gets better, I am very excite. Chrome 125 adds proper Early Hints debugging 😍.
- Speaking of the Chrome Inspector… with AI via Gemini it can now help you understand what the problem is and how to fix it, straight from the Console!
- My friends at NitroPack had their moment of fame this week while being showcased on Google I/O’s stage. Congrats Ivailo and Mihail! Helluva achievement. Not sure what NitroPack is, what it does, and why I have it listed in this little box right below? Listen to the interview I did with Ivailo, NitroPack’s CTO.
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 Blueprints Gallery for WordPress Playground is here! It’s like the plugin repository, but then for Blueprints.
You can share your Blueprints, try Blueprints created by others, edit them in builder. WILD to see where WordPress Playground is going. Wild, I tell ya.
Some of my favorite WordPress tools:
- The most versatile and accessible form solution for WordPress
- LocalWP, the easiest to use local dev solution
💡 Interesting Finds
- Kevin Geary shared an interesting article about CSS and as he states it, the case against numbered shares in design systems. I like it. He brings up great points and he made me think. I like that.
- DHH, of Basecamp and HEY fame shared an interesting article called “Open source is neither a community nor a democracy“. It’s where he discusses the nature of open source software development, emphasizing that it is not a democratic community where every user has a say in the project’s direction.
How much of this do you recognize?
🎁 Bonus
This is a very niche topic, but Lana Miro, partner manager over at Crocoblock published a free ebook on WordPress Partnerships.
That’s it for this week’s edition of Within WordPress. Thanks for reading!
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