On a Wednesday? Why yes, it is indeed a Wednesday. Or Odin’s Day, if you prefer. I am running a little experiment until the end of this year, so the day of arrival for this newsletter will vary a bit (more).
Shouldn’t stop you from enjoying it, so hope that you do!
🗞️ Within WordPress News
Here’s what I saw happening this past week:
- WordPress 6.9 RC1 is now available! We’re getting closer to seeing 6.9 released. Nice. And release candidate status means you all need to start testing in earnest.
6.9 brings some excellent performance upgrades, btw. Scripts and styles now load more efficiently, queries run faster with smarter caching, ES Modules and Import Maps gain support for “fetchpriority” hints, and output buffering follows consistent standards throughout.
- One of the nice things that WordPress 6.9 brings us is an overhauled theme.json. Less custom CSS and more theme.json. Support for two new form elements.
- NitroPack, one of my favorite performance tools, just launched their Cyber deal 🎉 If you’ve been thinking about speeding up your site, now’s the time: up to 30% off until Dec 7 with code CYBERMONTH2025 (or CYBERYEAR2025 for annual)
It’s the easiest way I know to get those Core Web Vitals in the green 👉 nitropack.io/
- Conversion Bridge, by Derek Ashauer, version 1.11 is now available, and with a wonderful feature: Google Analytics in your WordPress admin. Finally, a lean and mean way to see your Google Analytics in an understandable, readable fashion.
Love this update!
- Groundworx Navigation v1.0.5 by Johanne Courtright launches with tools to craft adaptive menus, modals, slide-ins, and fixed headers using pure WordPress blocks, no code needed, now featuring submenu depth controls from one to five tiers, plus indent or flatten choices, alongside various bug fixes and refinements.
Love seeing another innovation for the navigation block. You know, arguably the worst block we have in the land of FSE.
- Johanna released another plugin update, btw. Her all-in-one WordPress plugin bridges Gravity Forms with block themes effortlessly, offering polished form designs, intuitive color tweaks inside the editor.
- Ben Word from Roots.io shared a good explainer on the WordPress REST API vs admin-ajax.php debate.
- I’ve had a draft in my blog for years now. I attempted to list all the ways of making sure the reader would know how to best debug WordPress. I have finally published it, but I’m sure it’s still not complete. So please check it out and let me know what’s missing!
- Milda and Rasa from Omnisend talk about your Black Friday campaigns, and they’ll tell you exactly what to tweak to make them work wonders. Spoiler alert, you can use this wisdom for all your campaigns!
🤖 WordPress & AI
- The MCP Adaptor for WordPress saw a new release. Version 0.3.0, introduces significant architectural improvements with enhanced observability, streamlined transport infrastructure, and better error handling compliance.
- WordPress 6.9 also introduces the Abilities API, a clever system for plugins, themes, and core to declare and detect capabilities in formats friendly to both humans and machines, enabling seamless execution from JavaScript or PHP, such as via the wp shell.
🚀 Performance & Security
- This week I learned about Black Bar. In a way, a competitor to Query Monitor. Black bar excels in giving you the most relevant information you need when developing and troubleshooting performance (as slow/inefficient database queries and hooks are the primary cause of a slow WordPress website)
- A little over a month ago, I gave a talk at WordCamp Gdynia in Poland about how caching doesn’t solve performance problems. One of the topics I touched was TTFB. The WPBakery team was in the room and they took note. They assigned themselves some homework, and started comparing a bunch of pagebuilders, including their own, and wrote about the results.
That’s exactly the sort of impact I was hoping to have! Go team WPB!
- How to use Dependency Extraction in webpack to make your scripts smaller. A tutorial by Ian Svoboda.
- Another one published by me. I talk about why you should Stop Asking (me) Which Plugins to Use when it comes to performance. Or rather, asking which plugin is the faster one between two choices (Yoast SEO or SEO Framework, for example.
Everybody is looking for performance, but people want a shortcut to thinking. They want someone to hand them a list of “good” plugins and “bad” plugins so they can copy-paste their way to a fast site. As if performance were a recipe, not a craft. This is not the right approach. This is, btw.
🔆 Within WordPress Highlight
The WordPress 6.9 release cycle has been in full swing, and according to its schedule, Release Candidate 1 will happen on November 11, 2025, one day after this post is published. That week is also the time when contributors publish their Developer Notes on the Make Core Blog. You can read them via the Field Guide that is coming out as well. The final release will be on December 2, 2025.
💡 Interesting Finds
- The ::details-content CSS pseudo-element is now part of Baseline.
- The beloved Cloudflare debugger Dr.FLARE returns in a sleek, upgraded form as Dr.FLARE Reloaded, delivering vivid cache visuals, sharp hit-miss alerts, and instant performance metrics directly within DevTools.
- Animating layout isn’t always bad. Global CSS variables are a performance killer. Hardware accelerated blurs can crash sites. Surprised? Learn all about it!
- The benefits of bubbles. Great read. Excellent read, even.
🛒 WooCommerce News
- Marco Almeida, from Naked Cat Plugins saw my tweet, asking how to convert guess checkouts to usernames from the WooCommerce order view. And, with a little bit of back and forth, he created an absolutely wonderful plugin. He even let me name it: Create User Account from #WooCommerce Guest Order.
- Katie Keith from Barns2 did a survey on X, asking people why they are using WooCommerce. This is the result of that survey.
- WooCommerce 10.3.5 is released today, and it delivers critical bug fixes including WordPress 6.9 compatibility improvements, hierarchical brand CSV import support, and refined asset loading control for block themes.
That’s it for this week’s edition of Within WordPress. Thanks for reading!
Best, Remkus
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