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.
- Noel Tock said this: “WordPress is lagging the market in early wins/onboarding“. And I think he’s right. What do you think, dear reader?
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.
- WordPress 6.5 supports the AVIF image format, but you may want to wait implementing this if you want Google to pick those up as well.
- TIL about the WooCommerce Smooth Generator. It’d be great using this to test out the upcoming 8.8 RC release.
- WP Product Talk asked the WordPress product community for their favorite product release videos and they delivered. Here’s what they learned.
- Mark Howells-Mead shared his solution to load script translations for blocks. Neat-o.
🚀 Performance & Security
- There are many ways to optimize JavaScript. And I think this post pretty much covered them all.
- Human Made released version 3 of their Tachyon solution. In case you didn’t know, Tachyon is an innovative, on-demand image resizing and optimisation microservice.
- Patchstack and Sucuri collaborated on a 2024 State of the WordPress Security Whitepaper.
- 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:
- The best Front-end optimization plugin
- Cleaning up WordPress + script manager
- Cloud based performance optimizations
🔆 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:
- The most versatile and accessible form solution for WordPress
- LocalWP, the easiest to use local dev solution
💡 Interesting Finds
- CSS light-dark. Yes, it does exactly what it implies. Very cool.
- Play with image creating AI ON THE FLY. 🤯
🎁 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!
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