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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🗞️ Inside WordPress News
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 social image generating plugin page where he’s hosting this tool itself is pretty cool, too.
- 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 Calvin Alkan on my podcast at the end of last year and asked for a quote on this, as he is a security specialist over at Fortress , and this is what he had anything to say:
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, read the research and act accordingly.
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
Don’t use in-app web browsers if you care about keeping your passwords private: “Meta injects special “keylogging” JavaScript onto the website you’re visiting that allows the company to monitor everything you type and tap on, including passwords.”
That’s it for this week’s edition of Inside WordPress. Thanks for reading!
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