And 2025 it is! Happy New Year to you all. I’ve had a great couple of weeks off. Lots of needed rest, good family times, and eating olliebollen.
Today’s edition is a long one, but it is absolutely chuck full of gems.
Let’s dive in, hope you enjoy it!
🗞️ Within WordPress News
Here’s what I saw happening this past week:
- Marcus Burnette shared that he decided to add all the premium features he had for the Advanced Composer Blocks for Newsletter plugin to the free version and make it available for all. Pretty sweet plugin. Go check it out.
- Over the years, I’ve done a lot of different WordCamp talks, but I’ve rarely turned them into blog posts. Thought I’d change that going into 2025. First one is about “How To Tell if a WordPress Plugin Can Be Trusted”.
- Stumbled across the Blockera Site Builder. It basically puts the Block Editor in a super advanced mode. To say this plugin is powerful would be an understatement.
Heck, you could even say that this is what should’ve come out of Project Gutenberg? It’s mega powerful.
- “You’re not paying for a website, you’re paying for the thousands of hours it takes to become even half-assed at just a few things from the list above…” Great quote from a wonderful article called “Web Developers Are Assholes” by Kyle Van Deusen.
👀
- Joe McGill, who’s part of the WordPress Performance team, shared his reflections on the impact of that team over the last couple of years.
It’s a great read and gives you an idea how difficult the whole “let’s make things faster” is.
- WordPress used to work with a MySQL database, but in recent times, SQLite has become a great alternative (WordPress Playground uses SQLite for instance). And perhaps even the smarter choice in 80% of all WordPress sites? Anyway, Alex Goller wrote an excellent article about how to use WordPress with SQLite (without the need for an intermediary database).
Also, check this video by the WPMinute on debugging in WordPress: SQLite bugs vs. traditional SQL issues. Are we getting closer to parity in 2025?
- The most prolific WordPress plugin developer you’ll ever come across, Robert DeVore, shared another one of his great plugins:
- Delete Inactive Users. It has quite some features besides “just delete them already”.
- 📺 A one-click deploy workflow is shared by Kaspar Dambis. He uses it with a WordPress monorepo to quickly iterate and release plugin updates.
- WordPress Block Bindings API provides a powerful way to connect block content with dynamic data sources. While bindings themselves are useful, sometimes you need to modify their output. And what do you know, there’s a filter for that.
- Joost de Valk wrote about how WordPress uses comment cookies and why they can harm your site’s caching performance. In this post, he explains the issue in detail and provides a clear solution to fix it.
- We’re continuing with Dutch contributions because fellow Dutchman Jan Hoek shared his Vital Video Block that is designed to not let YouTube slow down your site.
Yes, publishing a plugin is a contribution to WordPress. I thought I’d clarify that, since we’re talking again about what a contribution to WordPress is. I wrote about that 2 years ago, and yeah, that system is broken. From every single angle.
Simply because in no way shape or form is it covering every single angle or impact.
- Another contribution was published by Ryan Hellyer. It’s called StaleCache, and it’s a Laravel inspired library for WordPress that implements stale-while-revalidate caching. Serves stale content while silently updating, it prevents cache stampedes, and it reduces load on expensive operations.
We can have too much caching, that is a thing, but we cannot have enough options to cache 🚀. And this is a super cool solution. Kinda should be in Core, if I’m honest.
- WooCommerce‘s James Kemp (check my podcast with him about Woo’s plans for 2025) worked with Amber Hinds and EqualizeDigital to get this AWESOME accessibility best practices guide for extension developers published.
- The creator of WordPress Playground, Adam Zielínski, was pretty productive during his Christmas break as he turned WordPress into a markdown editor, a git client, and a git server. It can:
- Edit local files
- Sync changes with from GitHub
- Push and pull directly to WordPress
And I love it. Check out the demo here.
🚀 Performance & Security
- Learn how to use Query Monitor to profile running time and memory usage of WordPress code, a great tutorial by David Allsop.
- Using DevTools to Validate Web Performance Improvements
- Don’t Let Your Redesign Ruin Performance: A Case Study
🔆 Within WordPress Highlight
Jono Alderson released a super cool plugin called Edge Images. It generates images at the Edge (think Cloudflare, not U2) in the most flexible and optimized way. It automagically speeds up your images, and optimizes their markup via your edge provider of choice (Cloudflare / Accelerated Domains / Imgix, BunnyCNN, etc.).
Congrats on your first (and utterly awesome) plugin, Jono!
💡 Interesting Finds
- Design studio Pentagram used Midjourney for a government project. They generated a series of illustrations based on handmade examples. They taught the AI the desired style and had it generate hundreds. The result is beautiful, and the process demonstrates how they used AI to their advantage.
- A dev item on my bucket list is to turn my handwriting into an actual font. And with Amy Goodchild‘s tutorial, I might actually get around to it.
- What determines the accessible name of an element? A question perfectly answered by Killian Valkhof.
That’s it for this week’s edition of Within WordPress. Thanks for reading!
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