It’s been a busy week full of releases, hasn’t it? Not only did we see 6.5.4, we also saw the very first beta of WordPress 6.6.
These weeks before large WordCamps, such as the upcoming WordCamp Europe in Torino, always seem to be full of extra work-load surprises. This past week, for me at least, was no exception 😅.
In other words, it’s been a busy week full of being pulled in every direction, but I still managed to fill the 123rd edition of Within WordPress.
Let’s jump in, hope you enjoy it!
🗞️ Within WordPress News
Here’s what I saw happening this past week:
- WordPress 6.6 will introduce a warm and welcome change that is about reducing the CSS specificity of all the styles used on the frontend. This change will make it a lot easier to override core styles for themes going forward.
- Angela Bowman shared her favorite WordPress utility plugins. I always enjoy reading someone else’s stance on what plugins they favor. The replies are also full of interesting plugins.
- Jamie Marsland continues with his wonderful WordPress Speed Build challenges. The latest and greatest was with Rich Tabor and Jonathan Jernigan. Incredible learning opportunities for anyone wanting to understand how to build sites in WordPress’ Site Editor.
- Server setups are always fun reads. Tim Nash‘s version is no exception, especially since I know Tim’s extensive hosting and security background.
I’ve stopped building my own servers years ago, but I still love playing around with setting one up.
- WordPress.com have really started welcoming agencies more now that they’ve opened up bulk pricing. Interesting move!
- Felix Arntz open-sourced his collection of MU plugins. They’re mostly about WP Admin UI enhancements, block editor tweaks, disabling some core features, and more neat little things like that.
- The second and final tutorial on how to build a book review site was published by Justin Tadlock over on the WordPress Developer Blog. It covers Block Bindings, Queries, Patterns and Templates. Part one lives here.
- Speaking of cool tutorials, Ryan Welcher streamed his version on how to create a slide deck with the Interactivity API on X.
Did you know Ryan also has a wonderful plugin called Advanced Query Loop?
- WP Accessibility Day is a 24 hour online event with awesome presentations about many aspects of accessibility, a11y for short. They are still looking for sponsors, btw!
- Whenever I mention WordPress Playground, I always get a few questions, and some of those are about whether it’s useful for a non-technical audience. This interview with Adam Zielínski did with Search Engine Journal covers this wonderfully, and more!
Highly recommend you read that, because I believe a very large part of WordPress’ future success depends on WordPress Playground. No cap.
- Emilia Capital, run by Joost de Valk and Marieke van de Rakt, have launched an interesting tool. It’s called Progress Planner and it aims to will help you to get that work done that makes your website successful.
- Dave Martin, product designer at Automattic, shares a free 43 lesson course that shares everything he’s learned about gathering design feedback over the past 20+ years. It’s called Better Design Feedback.
🚀 Performance & Security
- Speaking of Tim Nash, Tim’s “Confidently Clean a hacked WordPress Site” Workshop is on 16th July, and you can get all the info (even Early Bird ticket info) here.
- WooCommerce 9.0 is at the RC stage. This version is especially interesting because there’s work done to make High-Performance Order Storage (HPOS) even faster.
- The Google Chrome team shared three new Performance features to customize your workflows.
- The Chrome team also published a blog post this week detailing how we improved interaction performance by focusing on an unexpected web technology: cookies!
My favorite performance optimizing tools in WordPress:
- Nitropack: Cloud based performance optimizations
- WP Rocket: The best Front-end optimization plugin
- Perfmatters: Cleaning up WordPress + script manager
🔆 Within WordPress Highlight
- Gravity SMTP seamlessly integrates with trusted email service providers such as SendGrid, Mailgun, Postmark, and Brevo, as well as other SMTP and API-based services. By connecting your WordPress sites to these providers, users can overcome the limitations of WordPress’ default PHP Mail function, which often results in unreliable email delivery and messages being flagged as spam.
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
- Quick CSS tip: did you know that the CSS attribute selector supports an i flag?
- Ordering coffee via the command line is a thing. Because why not?!
🎁 Bonus
Speaking of coffee. If you, like me, don’t drink coffee, but you are curious for a wonderful alternative, check out my post on X on exactly that.
Lastly, do let me know if you’re going to be at WordCamp Europe next week. Please come say hi, I’d love to connect there.
That’s it for this week’s edition of Within WordPress. Thanks for reading!
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