Bring FSE Features to Classic Themes + Other 6.5 news & So Much More

If you’re serious about building better WordPress sites, this is the newsletter for you.

It’s here! No, I don’t mean this newsletter (although I would totally understand your enthusiasm 😄), but I’m referring to WordPress 6.5. The best version of WordPress we’ve seen so far and I’m not alone in this feeling. Right, Rafał?

Also, per usual, Rich Tabor created a wonderful thread on X highlighting all the wonderful parts 6.5 introduces. And there’s videos as well. Such joy.

But… 6.5 was not the only noteworthy thing. Nor was WordPress.org’s new homepage. There’s even more. Let’s explore what week 14 brought us in 2024, shall we?

🗞️ Within WordPress News

Here’s what I saw happening this past week:

  • One of the coolest features that 6.5 brings is the Font Library. However, it’s only available for the Site Editor themes. But what if you wanted to use it in a classic theme? Well, just follow this short and sweet HowTo I wrote.

It’s not as performant as could be though. Read up on Daan van den Bergh’s research to see what it’s missing.

Related: there are other additional ways your Classic Themes can support the Site Editor’s Appearance tools. You’ll have to enable add_theme_support() in your theme.


My podcast with Noel, which I recorded this week, will be published shortly and will cover this thread, as well as this thread.


  • Here’s a cool new WordPress plugin I saw getting released this week. It’s called RoadMapWP and it looks pretty neat for anyone wanting to publish a roadmap within WordPress.

Congrats on the launch James!


  • We all love a great success story, right? I know I do! Zack Katz wrote about how GravityView, a complementary plugin to GravityForms has made him more than $5.5M in 10 years. Quite the feat!

Speaking of GravityForms, GravityWiz (another GravityForms extender solution) published a tutorial on how to update posts with Gravity Forms.


  • I’m not a gamer, but I know what Minecraft is and how popular it is. I obviously also know what WordPress is, so to see these two things combined had to be mentioned here.



  • WP Product Talk asked the WordPress product community for their favorite product release videos and they delivered. Here’s what they learned.


🚀 Performance & Security




  • Rich Viscomi, DevRel for Chrome shared a thread highlighting all the performance related things Google’s been up to lately. Few have been covered in previous versions of this newsletter, but quite a few new interesting things were mentioned here.

  • You’d think any and all plugin builder would welcome it when security researchers let them know there’s an inherent issue with their software. You’d think. All I can say is Calvin is right. And he tried to bring that across.

My favorite performance optimizing tools in WordPress:


🔆 Within WordPress Highlight

Weird highlight, I know. But I really like this idea to have .org create nice social images that would be shown when you share these anywhere. There’s a Meta ticket that really could use your voice. I’m a big fan of the automatically generated version.

Some of my favorite WordPress tools:


💡 Interesting Finds


🎁 Bonus

My latest podcast release was with the CEO of BigScoots. One of the strong upcoming hosting companies specialized on WordPress. They’ve been in the hosting game for quite a while, and it’s wonderful to learn how they solve WordPress hosting problems. Learn all about them🎙️.


That’s it for this week’s edition of Within WordPress. Thanks for reading!

Join the Within WordPress Newsletter Today

Get on top of valuable WordPress news, tools, and techniques—and join more than 2000+ today!

This field is for validation purposes and should be left unchanged.
First name


Comments

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *