So, wow, where did the month of April go, huh? It’s been a crazy busy one. From road-tripping from NYC to PressConf in Phoenix to driving to Checkout Summit in Sicily, Italy. It’s been a lot of travel, but also countless great conversations
So, this edition is a bit of a catch-up on all things WordPress and learning and things announced. Because yes, I made an announcement you’re not going to want to miss:
There needs to be a place for serious WordPress Builders and Developers (and agencies) to keep leveling up together. Not a forum. Not another Slack or Discord. Not another place that starts with good intentions and then slowly turns into a stream of notifications, hot takes, and noise.
Lots of other news as well in the world of WordPress; hope you enjoy it!
🗞️ Within WordPress News
Here’s what I saw happening this past week:
- I’m sure you’ve seen the launch of WordPress 7.0 has been punted to later this month. I think
it was a good call . More on the why here .
- WordPress Playground now
has an MCP server . Gone are the days of wasting time spinning up a server environment as your AI agent needs only one command to read files, execute PHP, and build the sites entirely in the browser for you.
- This is a must-read for everyone building on top of WordPress:
What’s new for developers? (April 2026) . And it’s full of interesting information you need!
- Cloudflare released a CMS called
EmDash which is marketed as a replacement for WordPress. I’ve looked at it, played with, but it’s not. It is however interesting to look at what they’ve done and what we can learn from this. And I find myself very much aligning with what Brian Coords has to say on that . Brian also list lots of other people’s takes in that article, so I highly recommend you read his article!
- It is time for all of us
to level up in how we work with WordPress . If you have not already stepped into the professionalization phase of your WordPress career, you risk being left behind.
- We all know the tools to export your WordPress site to a static one, but Chris Huber tackled to other way around. So, we now have a
Static Site Importer takes raw HTML templates, converts to custom block theme that works in the Site Editor. In other words, you can now vibe code a WordPress site using static HTML.
- Austin Ginder built
Anchor Traffic Report . It’s a WordPress plugin for editorial-style viral-post traffic recap reports.
This is a super cool solution for those wanting to understand, you know, traffic to your site in a radically new way. LOVE it.
- Looks like the
creating of CPTs will be native inside the Site Editor as some point. You can already play with via the latest Gutenberg version and turning on this beta experiment.
Related: Brian Coords’
- As mentioned in the intro, I was at the inaugural Checkout Summit conference in Palermo, Italy. If you, for whatever reason, couldn’t make it but your work revolves around WooCommerce, you should checkout
Checkout Summit Reloaded which airs May 7-8 and is online!
- We all know that digital agencies are increasing AI investments due to the Intelligent Web. Check out
WP Engine’s AI Agency Trends Report to see how they adapt.
- I wrote about a misconception around WordPress & AI as I see it.
AI Isn’t Coming for WordPress . It’s Moving Into the Business Model.
- There is a published
roster of design tools per block for the upcoming WordPress 7.0 edition .
- You are not alone in thinking the world has sped up significantly with the infusion of all things AI into all things WordPress. To combat that a little, Lax Mariappan
created a curated list : 17 categories covering everything from the Abilities API to MCP servers, providers, and hosting. If you’re building in this space, add your project!
- Automattic has kicked off “Radical Speed Month,” a
month-long hackathon that has 400-plus teams at the company working on passion projects (how cool!), and one of those projects is called WP Desktop Mode . It’s a WordPress plugin that turns /wp-admin into a desktop-style interface with movable windows and a dock menu. It’s opt-in per user, doesn’t change core, and fully reverts on deactivation.
BTW, check out Daniel López‘
- If the above doesn’t say “future of WordPress” to you, then maybe this one will: You can now use Studio Code (part of Studio) its
AI coding agent for building entire WordPress sites locally : content, settings, themes, and plugins.
- Building WordPress blocks with an AI assistant? You’re probably wasting time describing where to make edits, right? Well, Slava Abukumov
built a library to address exactly this .
Ollie introduced Ollie AI . It allows you, instead of asking AI to design everything from scratch, for Ollie AI to tap into the massive library of professionally designed Ollie patterns. You skip the slow design step and jump straight into customizing high-caliber layouts, getting the speed of AI with the quality of human design.
- The Atarim Web Agency Summit took place last week, and WPBakery‘s
recap is covering what went down perfectly.
🚀 Performance & Security
- Austin Ginder published research about where
30 published plugins on the WordPress plugin repo had planted a backdoor in. Pretty wild things to see happen! - On the back of this👆🏻, Austin also released WP Beacon.
WP Beacon tracks every plugin on WordPress.org, its authors, committers, and releases to flag ownership transfers, dormant-then-activated takeovers, and release patterns that match known attacks.
- Query Monitor 4
introduces a new timeline view and a major architectural shift : panels now render client-side in Preact instead of server-side in PHP. The payoff is immediate: - Faster performance, especially on sites with lots of database queries, frequent PHP errors, or heavy panel data.
- A foundation for bigger upgrades ahead, including client-side metrics, lazy-loaded data, cross-request views, and more flexible ways to slice and remix what you collect.
- Smaller, lighter raw data, reduced in size and memory usage, and now exposed to the page as JSON. Want to explore it? Check out the
QueryMonitorDataobject in your browser console or favorite AI.
🔆 Within WordPress Highlight
Have you seen how
💡 Interesting Finds
- Addi Osmani from Google just dropped
his new Agent Skills and it’s incredible. It brings 19 engineering skills + 7 commands to AI coding agents, all inspired by Google best practices 🤯. AI coding agents are powerful, but left alone, they take shortcuts. They skip specs, tests, and security reviews, optimizing for “done” over “correct.” Addy built this to fix that. This post on X by Andrey Karpathy went extremely viral. Andrey talks about how to use LLMs as knowledge bases (in combination with Obsidian). - Cloudflare just open-sourced an email client where an AI agent reads your inbox, drafts your replies, and never sends anything without your permission. It’s called
Agentic Inbox and is 100% open-source.
🛒 WooCommerce News
- WooCommerce 10.7 was released, and it’s a great improvement on all fronts.
Especially on the performance side of things . And we all know I love to make WordPress fast(er) in every single way possible. - Rodolfo Melogli, the organizer of Checkout Summit, published an
open letter to Woo and its community after a very successful first edition. I hope Woo is listening. 🤞🏻 - Watch the
recap of Checkout Summit in on the Do the Woo podcast , yours truly was part of this group of fine people. - Woo Ships WooCommerce Subscriptions Health Check Tool Following Disclosure of Four Renewal Bugs
🔎 Scanfully Updates
We have released two new updates for Scanfully in the past month, which I think you’re going to like:
Vulnerability monitoring is now built into Scanfully 1.8 Scanfully 1.9 introduces Email Deliverability Monitoring for WordPress
And we’re going to do a lot more with that last one in the next versions. Form validation will be solved soon!
🎁 Bonus
My
That’s it for this week’s edition of Within WordPress. Thanks for reading!
Best, Remkus
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