Last week I announced my
And I wasn’t the only one being busy last week. The WordPress Core team was as well, as we saw not only Beta 1 but Beta 2 as well! So, lots to cover there plus other stuff as well.
Let’s dive in, shall we? Hope you enjoy it!
🗞️ Within WordPress News
Here’s what I saw happening this past week:
Oh, and
WP System Report by Christopher Smith an interesting project on GitHub. It’s a comprehensive WordPress system status report plugin with AI-optimized export. I like how you can easily view PHP error logs directly from the WordPress admin with it.
- ”Lax Mariappan said, “The hardest part of adopting the Abilities API isn’t writing wp_register_ability(). It’s figuring out which of your 200+ hooks actually deserve to be an ability. That’s a manual, boring, error-prone task”, so he built
Abilities Scout .
Really cool plugin. The Abilities API has so much potential. We’re barely scratching the surface here.
- You’ve been here: at one point you were using shortcodes, but your site has moved on, and now you have tons of empty shortcodes in your content. But how do you remove them? Tom McFarlin
created a super smooth solution for that , and he recently updated it. Well worth looking into.
- WordPress.com released
a new Skills and a Claude Cowork plugin designed for vibe coders and anyone who wants to create WordPress themes, generate sites, and experiment with AI-assisted development. They claim you’ll find that you don’t need to be technical at all 🤔
Elliott Richmond took it for a spin
- We hear countless people on the “creating websites” spectrum in the WordPress Community talk about what effect AI might have on WordPress, but we’ve not heard much from how designers in our ecosystem look at it. Which is why I enjoyed
reading Rafal Tomal‘s take on this . One of my favorite designers I know in the WordPress space.
- Friendly reminder that when you’re testing WordPress 7.0, do
play with the MCP Adapter as well . And before you do that, read up on how to use that adapter.
Maybe this still sounds buzzwordy to you, but this adapter just opens up WordPress in so many ways; you really owe it to yourself to get acquainted with it as fast as you can.
- Marcel Schmitz released
wp-devdocs-mcp , a local MCP server that indexes every action, filter, block registration, and JS API call from WordPress, WooCommerce, Gutenberg, or any plugin you work with.
- I keep seeing WooCommerce site owners who’ve clearly outgrown their email tools, but they stay because migration feels risky. Simply because the switch sounds like weeks of chaos, broken automations, and revenue dips. So they tolerate a setup that no longer fits. One more reason I love hooking my clients up with Omnisend because they now handle the entire migration for brands moving to their platform. If you have Woo (or just WP) clients stuck on Mailchimp,
go check them out .
- If you have photos in the WordPress Photo Directory and you’d like to show them on your WordPress site… well, you’re in luck! Marcus Burnette released a plugin doing exactly that. Fun plugin! It’s called
WP Photos !
- In the
previous edition of the Within WordPress newsletter , I announced the WebMCP project by the Chromium devs. Well, there’s now a WordPress integration created by Vikram.
- If Gutenberg had let us register blocks without touching JavaScript from the get-go, there probably would’ve been a much higher adoption rate for the Block-based world we live in now, but it looks like
we… might… have this now??
- If you spend any amount on Trac, you know there’s a lot of UX improvement. I know, I know, huge understatement. To that point, JuanMa Garrido created a Chrome extension that adds role badges, keyword timelines, milestone history, and component maintainer info right to WordPress Trac tickets.
Makes triage way more efficient .
- Looooved Carl Alexander‘s
year in review .
- Dave “the friendly web guy” Grey created
ToggleWP . It’s a plugin for clients who mean well but occasionally break things. Like deactivating critical plugins, missing domain renewals, or creating support emergencies on Friday afternoons. ToggleWP notifies you when this happens. Cool solution!
- Coen Jacobs released
version 1.1.0 of Mozart . The plugin you need to handle dependencies inside WordPress. It now finally ships an AST-based replacement engine (using nikic/php-parser) instead of the original regex approach.
SudoWP is a community-first effort that adopts orphaned WordPress plugins and brings them back into safe hands. It hunts down and fixes critical security flaws so the code stays stable, secure, and usable for everyone. It folds this into an LLM tooling to streamline and strengthen plugin stewardship. And it’s a cool initiative.
- We should really stop interacting with the “
WordPress is dead” clickbaity articles .
🚀 Performance & Security
- Google’s released
CrUX Vis – a experimental CrUX tool to allow you to visualize CrUX History API data. - I talked, well, wrote about my love for the
REST API and focused on how to make it more performant .
🔆 Within WordPress Highlight
WordPress 7.0 is a wonderful release for a great many reasons, lots of them AI-related, but especially so for core PHP contributors as well. And respectively for the overall quality of the core codebase. Because… PHPStan is now part of the core development workflow! Learn more about it in
Some of my favorite WordPress tools:
- My two favorite forms for WordPress:
Gravity Forms and WS Form - These are the themes I use:
Ollie , Rockbase and GeneratePress - And, obviously,
Scanfully for all my Site Health & Performance monitoring
💡 Interesting Finds
detail.design is the kind of resource we all wish existed 10 years ago. A curated collection of tiny UI details like physics-based modal dismissals, blur tricks for optical alignment, and shaking disabled buttons. The stuff that separates good interfaces from ones that feel right. - The Cloudflare API has over 2,500 endpoints. Exposing each one as an MCP tool would consume over 2 million tokens.
With Code Mode , they collapsed all of it into two tools and roughly 1,000 tokens of context 🤯
🛒 WooCommerce News
In the upcoming WooCommerce version 10.7, Woo will
So… if you haven’t, why haven’t you? What are you waiting for? If it’s Woo-related plugin that are still not compatible after years of having HPOS to their availability, it’s time to say goodbye to those plugins and find replacements, IMHO.
Do you have any WooCommerce sites left on non-HPOS database tables, friend?
- WooCommerce 10.6 introduces lazy loading for the Product Image block by default. Developers can customize this behavior using the new
woocommerce_product_image_loading_attr filter. - A new version of
WC Smooth Generator , the test data tool for WooCommerce, is out. There are a number of improvements, big and small, including brands and cogs support, PHP 8.5 compatibility, sample attribution data from AI sources, and more.
🎁 Bonus
🎙️ The Within WordPress podcast released this week was with CloudFest’s lead organizer Carole Olinger and Mark Weisbrod (who helped out with the programming). The reason I invited them was to elaborate on the pivot CloudFest has made with the WP Summit (previously WP Day). It’s now two full days of dedicated WordPress talks for WP businesses and WP agencies.
Yours truly will be speaking as well, and
TL;DR: You should really find yourself in Europa Park in April.
That’s it for this week’s edition of Within WordPress. Thanks for reading!
Best, Remkus
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