Yesterday was a full day of travel to CloudFest, and the stars did not align well enough for me to finish wrapping up the newsletter. But I figured, a better a day too late than not at all, right?
Courtney says hi to you from CloudFest, btw. As do a lot of other WordPress folks, so maybe you should be here as well next year?
But let’s dive in, hope you enjoy it!
🗞️ Within WordPress News
Here’s what I saw happening this past week:
- Ben Marshal wrote about the View Transitions API. It is a browser-native tool for creating seamless animations between page or UI state changes. It simplifies what used to require complex CSS or JavaScript, making smooth transitions accessible and efficient. Can be used in Block themes as well as Classic themes.
- Switch to better email & SMS marketing with Omnisend. Get the top-rated email marketing platform to convert & keep more customers. Get started today!
- As you’ve read in the intro, I’m at CloudFest this year, and so is Carl Alexander, creator of Ymir. Ymir is a serverless solution for WordPress. Carl shared a case study which I’ll happily share, but I’ve had him on the Within WordPress podcast as well if you want to learn more about what Ymir does.
- Kinsta did a great “this what we learned from Black Friday” recap. It’s particularly geared towards e-commerce sites, but there’s lots of learning points for everyone.
- My good friend Anne-Mieke Bovelett, also here at CloudFest, published a white paper last week to guide you on how to save yourself from wasting money on fake accessibility.
- 📺 Curious on how to build a WooCommerce AI Bundle Generator with React & AI Services? Of course you are, and Brian Coords has got your back!
- Jack Arturo has updated his guide on using Cursor and AI for WordPress development with the latest Cursor 0.47 changes.
- The Atarim Web Agency Summit is just over three weeks away. Their latest blog post breaks down everything you can expect from the largest virtual event in the agency space.
🚀 Performance & Security
- Cool read on how Shopify built an in-house observability platform, called Observe. It handles massive scale efficiently, and it’s reducing costs and improving performance by leveraging open-source tools. Can’t help but wonder what WordPress builders can learn about this.
- Here’s a great introduction to the content-visibility CSS feature, detailing its functionality and optimal usage scenarios. Faster rendering is one of them.
- 📺 With ~84% of websites using custom web fonts, they’ve become a standard on most websites. But ensuring they don’t negatively impact web performance and user experience can be challenging.
- Google Chrome’s latest CrUX update delivers granular LCP and RTT insights. This can help with optimizing page speed and user experience.
🔆 Within WordPress Highlight
Patchstack released their State of WordPress Security for 2025. This quote stood out for me:
Perhaps the most surprising finding from 2024 is that more than half of the plugin developers to whom Patchstack reported a vulnerability did not patch the issue before official disclosure. This raises concerns about whether the WordPress ecosystem is ready for the CRA or other security regulations
I highly encourage you to dive in.
💡 Interesting Finds
- I guarantee you, you can, and possibly should(!), write better commit messages.
- CSS is getting function support. It can now accept arguments with optional type-checking and default values, and return values using the result descriptor. Wild. Read all about it in this CSS Tricks article.
- How to create visually distinct containers in CSS Grid without extra markup, but still enhancing design adaptability. I’m telling ya, CSS keeps getting better and more powerful!
- The :not CSS selector is still very much underused. You should really learn about the power of the :not selector in CSS. So, to help you with that, here’s an article with practical examples that help you apply this selector where it makes sense.
- I’m still quite happy using Postman, but this week I learned there’s an open-source alternative called Hoppscotch.
🎁 Bonus
This was a FASCINATING read: We’ve been wrong about math for 2300 years.
That’s it for this week’s edition of Within WordPress. Thanks for reading!
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