There’s not a day that goes by that I’m not amazed at the wonderful stuff that’s being built on top of WordPress. This past week has been no exception. I’m particularly excited for the Inline Blocks and the HTML API that keeps getting better.
All these goodies will be available in WordPress 6.7 (which is now testing at Beta 3), so start diving into what’s next in WordPress.
Hope you enjoy!
🗞️ Within WordPress News
Here’s what I saw happening this past week:
- Exciting news on the WooCommerce front. Together with Equalize Digital and 10up, WooCommerce is going to do a full a full accessibility audit of the frontend. There’s already a long list of items they’re going to work on, but this is very exciting!
Side note: WooCommerce 9.4 will be released later than intended.
- If you’re working with Laravel, you’ve no doubt heard of Herd. It’s their version of Local / MAMP Pro. Brian Coords shared a video about that and Riza Maulana Ardiyanto shared a wonderful script that installs WordPress in one go.
- Speaking of videos, when you want to embed them into WordPress, that’s generally a straight forward process. But… there’s controls that would make it smoother. Mark Wilkinson created Better Core Video Embeds that allows you to set custom thumbnails, for instance. And some performance optimizations! Check it out.
- WooSesh, The virtual conference for WooCommerce store builders designed to help grow your business, is scheduled for the end of this month again. You should check it out if you’re doing anything with WooCommerce.
- Ronald Huereca has been working on his Photo Block plugin for more than a year, but it’s finally available on the repo.
I was afraid to ask if he’d worked on it fulltime 😏
- Have you ever found yourself wanting to disable WordPress blocks in various contexts, such as by post type, user role, post editor vs. site editor, etc? Well, you’re in luck because you can now learn how to do exactly that.
- In repeat as this was missing a link last week: Inline blocks are coming to WordPress! They’re called bits (for now) and they are looking quite cool already. Check out this video to get an idea of what they look like and facilitate.
This is going to give us sooo many new options to build different kinds of designs! Love this addition.
- Justin Tadlock wrote a deep dive into theme.json, style variations, and more. It’s full of tips and tricks.
- HeroPress is 10 years old! Topher DeRosia did a post about it and the impact it’s made in the past decade. They are also doing a fundraiser.
- The team at Big Bite is running their State of Enterprise WordPress survey again. This time for 2024: Let them know what you think.
- Block Themes or FSE Themes are the future, but what if you still need to build classic/hybrid themes? Fränk Klein‘s got your back with 5 Tips for Styling the Block Editor in Classic or Hybrid Themes.
- InstaWP ran their AnyoneCanWP hackathon keynote event and it was quite the success. Joost de Valk lead a great session. You can check out here.
- The WordPress HTML API is getting quite the update with WordPress 6.7. I mean, Full HTML Support, Ability to modify most text in a document, A full-parser mode in the HTML Processor, Normalization of input documents, and Thorough review and alignment of CSS-related behaviors are quite the expansions.
🚀 Performance & Security
- Are you developing WordPress block plugins? Then I highly encourage you to read up on the new block type registration APIs, which will be part of the upcoming WordPress 6.7 release. By using them, you’ll be able to notably improve server-side performance.
🔆 Within WordPress Highlight
Forking is at the core, at the heart of open source. Without forks we’ve never would have seen WordPress, for instance, as it started as a fork off of B2.
The importance of being able to fork even the biggest Open Source projects can’t be understated, but the complexity is easy to overlook. Gary Pendergast wrote a wonderful article on how to fork WordPress deep diving into this topic.
Should you find yourself in need of doing that.
💡 Interesting Finds
- Google Docs now has tab support 😍. Imagine being able to combine this with WordPress’ upcoming collaboration mode 😍 😍 😍
🔎 Scanfully Updates
Many of you guessed it right last week. Scanfully is indeed adding Performance Profiling for WordPress. We’ll dive deeper into what that looks like in a follow-up article, btw.
🎁 Bonus
🎙️ I did a podcast with Nathan Wrigley for his WP Builds called “Get it Optimised“. It focusses on where to start with, you guessed it, optimizing your WordPress site. This is the first in a series.
Leave a Reply