You know what I’ve learned twice in between sending this and the previous newsletter? I can’t count.
Last week wasn’t number 148, it was 147. And, when moving over my podcasts to a separate
Anyway. Enough about past failures, let’s dive into this week’s most noteworthy WordPress news.
Get in front of 1800+ dedicated WordPress friends and check out
🗞️ Within WordPress News
Here’s what I saw happening this past week:
- The WordPress Developer site saw the “
What’s new for developers? (February 2025) ” resource posted and, as always, I highly recommend you check it out.
- I was quite happy to see
my friends at Greyd are going to sponsor my friend Tammie Lister in some of her contributions to WordPress .
More about Tammie at the bottom of this email, btw 🎙️
- If you have not clicked the link to my dedicated YouTube channel for the Within WordPress podcast yet, you’re missing out on getting a glimpse of my new branding, btw.
Just saying .
- 📺 Oh, and speaking of Greyd, they did a podcast with Rosanne van Staalduinen about her Buro Staal agency’s switch from Elementor to FSE for a very large project. Cold turkey switch. And I may or may not have had something to do with that 😊.
Anyway, a great listen !
- 📺 Bet Hannon did a great accessibility compliance webinar, as mentioned in a previous edition, for the fine folks at SolidWP. You can watch “
Understanding Legal Requirements for Web Accessibility ” here.
- MCP, an open standard for connecting AI assistants to data systems, is gaining traction. James LePage, AI lead over at Automattic, shared a proof of concept
how WooCommerce can integrate with AI via MCP .
CommandUI’s website was completely overhauled by Calvin Alkin. CommandUI, if you didn’t know, vastly improves the native command palette for WordPress. Just hit ⌘+K (or Ctrl+K on Windows) and instantly search, install plugins, create new content, and navigate anywhere. Super cool plugin, and great job on the new paint, Calvin!
- Have you tried the new WooCommerce transactional email templates yet? The modernized templates are cleaner, better structured, and the first step toward full Block Editor customization.
Try them out and share your feedback.
WordPress 6.8 will use bcrypt for password hashing . You’ll want to read up on this.
- Interesting
post over at The Repository. We all know WordPress gets a bad rap as one of the “most avoided” platforms in lots of polls left and right, but the fact is, WordPress is as popular as ever. Rae Morey shared the following quote:
WordPress sentiment on other social platforms, including Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, YouTube, and Tumblr, remained largely unaffected, holding at 96% positive.
- Derek Ashauer released a neat little drop-in class called
Support Access Manager as his way of giving back to the WordPress Project ( there are lots of different ways to do that , btw)
- Just a quick reminder that one of my favorite plugins by 10up saw a neat little update. The plugin sends restricted visitors to the login page, redirects them, or displays a message or page automatically based on IP addresses. Check out
Restricted Site Access .
🚀 Performance & Security
- Did you know Archive.org provides a performance dashboard with slice and dice capability? E.g.,
you can sort big WordPress hosts by TTFB . - Can we have the recording of
this talk already , please? Team WC Asia? Pretty please? - There are a lot of ways to
break up long tasks in JavaScript . - Looking
how browsers choose the right image to load with srcset, dpr, and sizes
🔆 Within WordPress Highlight
I’ve highlighted GravityKit before, and this tutorial on
💡 Interesting Finds
Windows 95 in the browser . As a website. Never not fun. - This has got nothing to do with this newsletter, and yet I wanted to share it with you:
50 years of travel tips . - And the last one for this week is a 🤯:
🔎 Scanfully Updates
🎁🎁 Bonus
🎙️ Yup, that’s a double bonus. There’s one you could have seen coming, as I promised more about Tammie Lister. We’ve talked a lot about Project Guildenberg and how it helps the future of WordPress, amongst many other things.
…but there’s more!
I’ve also published my podcast with Felix Arntz, and we talked a lot about the WordPress Core Performance Team, the work they do, and WordPress & AI:
That’s it for this week’s edition of Within WordPress. Thanks for reading!
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