Today I finalized most of my travel until April, and looks like I’ll be having an awesome father-and-son roadtrip season ahead of me with Roan. I’ll be going to
You should really consider all three, but definitely the new ones:
But, of course, 2026 is not just about travel; it’s about WordPress news as well! And I can just about guarantee that today’s Within WordPress newsletter is the best newsletter I’ve created all year! Chock-full of wonderful resources and must-reads!
Hope you enjoy it!
🗞️ Within WordPress News
Here’s what I saw happening this past weeks:
- The
What’s New for Developers, January 2026 edition, is published on the WordPress Developer blog. It both looks back at the 6.9 release and looks forward to what 7.0 is going to focus on. 10/10 should check out.
- Matt Cromwell, of GiveWP fame, released a super fun plugin. It’s called Synced Pattern Popups and it helps you create popups using the WordPress editor you already know, not yet another builder. Pretty cool!
BTW, can we talk about setting a max limit for the number of Matts we have in the WordPress Community? It’s getting confusing now when you shout “Hey Matt!” at a WordCamp and half of the crowd is turning around 👀
- Working smarter. Felix Arntz loves doing that. And that’s wonderful and all, but do you know why it’s newsworthy for this newsletter? Well, he enjoys sharing what he has with us. Check out his
CLI with various tools for WordPress plugin maintenance npm package.
- You can do this in Cloudflare, and that will always be my preference, but if you must block AI Bots from your WordPress server,
this list by Jeff Starr is the way to do it.
- Technically not about WordPress, but in a way it is because you can create SPAs with WordPress. This article, published on the Web Performance Calendar, talks about how single-page apps are the wrong architectural choices for websites. Alex Russell
crunches RUM numbers to call out the SPA hype mismatch .
- Running out of space in your header? Don’t hide your menu; optimize it with the
Priority Plus Navigation plugin Troy Chaplin created. Very nice menu-optimizing solution for Block Themes!
- If you were thinking of creating a command for the new command palette, Ronald Huereca has a starter repo for you. It’s called
CMD Starter , and it features two built-in commands and demonstrates loading the command palette everywhere (including the frontend).
- James Kemp built
a Raycast script that spins up a fresh, fully loaded WooCommerce Playground site in seconds with one trigger: type “Woo” and hit enter. It auto-installs the latest WooCommerce plus Query Monitor and WC Smooth Generator, generates 25 products and 20 orders, skips the setup wizard, sets PHP 8.2, and drops you straight into a logged-in wp-admin for instant bug triaging or testing!
- There’s not really a performance gain here, but it looks like there is:
View Transitions are coming to the WP Admin in WordPress 7.0 ! It makes the dashboard so smooth and snappy.
- Weston Ruter made me real happy this week. He’s been working on a ticket I interacted with about optimizing the Post Date Block. In short, he has worked on a way for the
Post Date block in WordPress to automatically append the modified date , but only when it differs from the publish date.
It would be good to get rid of my hacky solution for this and have this in core!
🤖 WordPress & AI
- Automattic shared their
Agent Skills repo. It offers portable bundles of instructions, checklists, and scripts that help AI assistants (Claude, Copilot, Codex, Cursor, etc.) understand WordPress development patterns, avoid common mistakes, and follow best practices.
Quality of output went up quite a bit for me after using this!
- James LePage asks for feedback on
a WordPress plugin that’s designed for site-level editorial guidelines . Define voice, tone, copy rules, and vocabulary that AI features can consume, and all that. - Related to that, James shared another cool tool released by Core AI called
WP-Bench . It’s a benchmark for evaluating how well AI models understand WordPress development. - Speaking of James, do read his series on
The Future of The Web .
- Artur Pizcek delivers
a clear and insightful look at Automattic’s approach to building AI features for WordPress.com, using practical PHP-based agents that stay modular, safe, and quick without heavy frameworks, and mentions the items listed above. Must read.
- Another good article on
WordPress, AI and the future of software development was published by, fellow lover of iron, Jonathan Bossenger.
AI Experiments has launched an exciting update packed with innovative features and enhancements.
🚀 Performance & Security
- DNS tools, can you really have too many of those? Jeff Starr s
hared a bunch , and I most certainly learned about a few new ones!
- Jeff Dean and Sanjay Ghemawat
share straightforward Performance Hints to make code noticeably faster in spots that really matter by giving the computer smart nudges to skip wasted effort and handle common cases more smoothly. Non-WordPress related, but still a very interesting read.
- Sabrina Zeidan tested a bunch of Wishlist plugins (for WooCommerce), and the results were absolutely pisspoor. So,
be sure you’re using the one that doesn’t tank your site’s performance !
- Speaking of WooCommerce, Ian Misner over at CheckoutWC shared a
performance guide you should check out.
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
🔆 Within WordPress Highlight
This week, I moved two clients off of Mailchimp and onto Omnisend, and both clients could not be happier. And when I say “moved”, I mean I took advantage of Omnisend’s wonderful migration service for the flows, automations, and campaigns. It’s a no-brainer, really.
Time to reevaluate your clients on Mailchimp, like right now. Gone are the days of clunky and confusing Mailchimp dashboards.
If you haven’t yet, go check them out with a
💡 Interesting Finds
- The fine folks at
20i hosting shared a fun blog post with the title “ The Internet Is Still Fun (and These 9 Playful Websites Prove It) “. I quite enjoyed this. Can we have more fun posts like this, please? - Firefox now has a new
URL Pattern API available . You can use it to match and extract parts of URLs; no need to reinvent routing logic. Supports literals, wildcards, named groups, and even regex constraints. - They also released
Compression Dictionary Transport ! It’s a new HTTP feature that can dramatically shrink the size of your responses, especially when serving content that changes often but includes a lot of repeated structure (think: JSON, JS, CSS). Can’t wait to see this everywhere else as well. - Enjoyed reading Addy Osmani‘s
21 Lessons From 14 Years at Google . - 📺 This might be one of the most beautiful videos I’ve ever watched. You’ll need to have some idea of how LLMs work internally to follow along, but the findings of the papers
presented in this video are incredible . - Clickbaity title, but some genuinely good stuff here:
4 CSS Features Every Front-End Developer Should Know In 2026 .
🛒 WooCommerce News
- Coulda shoulda probably listed this in the performance section, but WooCommerce 10.5 introduces an experimental Product Object Caching feature that
improves performance by caching product instances during each request , preventing duplicate product loads from the database.
I know they really have to focus on performance if they want to stay relevant, but credit where credit is due, they really are putting in the effort. Love this.
- Came across
ArchiveMaster . A plugin by WPPOOL that auto-archives and exports old orders for WooCommerce. Now, great hosting shouldn’t force you to use this, especially with HPOS activated, but if you must, this is a great tool.
- WooCommerce 10.5 will include changes to how category-based product permalinks are generated by prioritizing the deepest category for better SEO and consistency in URLs. Read more about
how to prepare for this change . Because you should prepare!
WooCommerce 10.5 is scheduled for February 3rd, btw.
🔎 Scanfully Updates
Right before the break, we launched our Broken Link scanner alongside our hosted
Curious?
🎁 Bonus
Podcasts will resume next week and I’ve already got two excellent conversations lined up for you. One with Jono Alderson and the other with Elliott Richmond. Stay tuned, and go and
That’s it for this week’s edition of Within WordPress. Thanks for reading!
Best, Remkus
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