I hope you had a wonderful holiday season and New Year’s. I certainly did. Lots of downtime, family time, and way too much food. Just like it’s supposed to be.
While some of you have having a quiet few weeks, others have been very productive already, so welcome to a very full 101th edition of Inside WordPress!
Let’s jump right in, shall we?
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Here’s what I saw happening this past week:
- Cameron Jones published an article about how to handle,
how to manage a declining plugin . He lists all the possible reasons and touches on the lack of data available from .org.
Very good read. I think you should read it. Regardless of whether you’re a WordPress plugin developer or not.
- Corey Maass released an
Open Graph testing/preview tool to check on your social images.
Love neat tools like this! And the
- Proof of concept
code to enrich image uploads with captions and descriptions upon uploading them to WordPress
There’s a lot to be optimized in this code example, but this is a great demonstration of how to use AI in a manner where it truly makes sense.
Advanced Query Loop by Ryan Welcher is one of my personal favorite plugins that enhances a default Block. Ryan recently updated it so now ACF users will see their meta keys in the auto-complete list for Post Meta queries!
- WordPress as a game development platform. Not your usual application, but Jonathan Bossenger took that idea to heart and created exactly that. And
you get to play with it ! See if you can push yourself onto that leaderboard.
- Love this wonderful tutorial. This is how you should write them:
How To Create InnerBlocks with ACF
Four year recaps to learn from:
All four most excellent reads. And I’d be surprised if you didn’t learn anything from either one of those.
🚀 Performance
- Felix Arntz released a performant, accessible, cross-browser compatible smooth scrolling plugin. It’s called
Fast Smooth Scroll . - Rhys Wynne recently published a very thorough comparison on what the fastest and slowest Page Builders. He’s
comparing Visual Composer, Beaver Builder, Elementor, and the WordPress Site Editor . - One of the new metrics that will be
added to the Core Web Vitals is INP . Something you should prepare your sites for already as it will become a very important metric soon. This article that’s an analysis of INP performance using real-world RUMvision data is a great starting point to understand what’s what.
My favorite performance optimizing tools in WordPress:
The best Front-end optimization plugin Cleaning up WordPress + script manager Cloud based performance optimizations
🔆 Inside WordPress Highlight
The Real Attack Vector Responsible for 60% of Hacked WordPress Sites in 2023.
Yeah, that sentence should indeed grab your attention. We Watch Your Website plublished an incredibly in-depth article with exactly that title.
Let me repeat: 60% of WordPress sites are hacked through session hijacking. Exploited Plugin/Theme Vulnerabilities are distant second. The mean sample size: 6m sites and 851 billion data points analyzed. That’s insane. I had
I can only see this trend rising as more and more sites adopt 2FA and because almost nobody in the ecosystem has any protection against it.
So where I was hoping for some, I dunno, something positive… he’s actually doubling down on the severity of the trend. In other words,
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
- Did you know there’s an overview of meetups and WordCamps nowadays? Bookmark this URL and let 2024 be all about the revival of meeting up over WordPress:
https://events.wordpress.org/
🎁 Bonus
That’s it for this week’s edition of Inside WordPress. Thanks for reading!
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