Hope you enjoyed your extra day yesterday. Can you believe we’re already 8 episodes into 2024 on this first day of March? Crazy how fast this goes. One more month to finish our Q1 goals for Scanfully 👀
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🗞️ Within WordPress News
Here’s what I saw happening this past week:
- The Interactivity API is coming to WordPress 6.5 as I’ve covered in a previous Within WordPress newsletter. Mark Howells-Mead shared his thoughts on it.
It’s a great read if you want to get a good feel for what it can do.
- Joost de Valk has build a proof of concept that would default to blocking SEO tools from crawling his site. His goal is to bring this to core as the amount of blocked crawlers would save a huge amount of bandwidth and resources used on all WordPress sites that don’t need those crawlers. And that is the vast majority.
It’s no surprise Joost continues to optimize everything where he sees room for improvement. That’s been his MO since day one. Point in case, he also released a plugin this week that helps you clean up options in WordPress.
- Something has changed over at Woo. And it’s not just the name change! Everyone at Woo is much more trying to share and interact with the community these days. It’s much needed as WooCommerce itself has a lot to fix and improve if it wants to continue to compete with the likes of Shopify.
Brent MacKinnon, Developer Experience Lead for WooCommerce shared a couple of things you should take a look at if you’re working with WooCommerce.
- Tole from Convoworks shared a step by step guide on how to turn a simple WordPress blog into an enhanced Twitter bot. Pretty interesting read on what you can build inside WordPress to connect those two platforms.
- Ronnie Burt shared the Gravatar Manifesto. Yes, that gravatar thing where most of us have a dormant account is seeing action an innovation since years!
- A recent Hallway Hangout saw WordPress leadership chime in on overlapping problems with the Site Editor. In a very open conversation they discussed a lot of pain points with end users. The summary of this is published on the Make WordPress Core blog.
- There’s a new team for the WordPress GitHub repo that is meant to be pinged to raise issues, pull requests, etc that need testing / feedback. If you or someone you know has opinions about how things should work / what’s missing etc please connect here.
- The full tutorial on how to create block-based mega menus was published on the WordPress Developer Blog by Nick Diego.
- My buddy James Giroux was running an editor trial for WP Tavern and he just published the most Canadian announcement for #WCEH – the very first WordCamp Canada.
🚀 Performance & Security
- The latest version of Chrome now includes the Speculation Rules API. You should read up on how that can improve performance as well as look at the Speculation Rules WordPress plugin that was released by the WordPress Performance Team.
- Jeff Star, of Perishable Press fame, released the final version of 8G Firewall. It’s a set of .htaccess rules that blocks a ton of unwanted traffic for your WordPress sites.
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
- MainWP recently saw the release of version 5. They wrote up a great behind the scenes article on what it took to create version 5. Lovely deep dive in what such huge releases take!
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
- Via Konstantin I discovered a new (to me) cURL replacement for the command line. HTTPie FTW.
- And when you have that installed, you can then use it to cURL the weather on the command like with wttr.in.
- The creators of the Atom Code editor open-sourced their new Rust-based high performance editor. Kinda cool. I mean, if you’re the kind that likes to test different editors. It’s called Zed.
- If you’ve ever had to google how to solve something with CSS, you’ve seen CSS Tricks. Chris Coyier sold that site to Digital Ocean is it’s been dead in the water ever since. Chris obviously doesn’t like that and published his view on where he’s at with the whole CSS-Tricks thing.
🎁 Bonus
The same Konstantin (Kovshenin) that shared that interesting find above also released a Revue / Tinyletter newsletter replacement today. It’s called Mailbob and I’ve seen the demo. It’s minimalistic, smooth, and (almost) ready for some sweet never-seen-before WordPress integrations.
That’s it for this week’s edition of Within WordPress. Thanks for reading!
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