Most of my week was AFK in Rome and Tuscany, but I still managed to collect a full edition of this Within WordPress newsletter. I also have something exciting to share with me joining Future of Team (formerly TeamWP and founded by James Giroux). Read all about it in my blog post or on the Future of Team’s website.
Anyway, lots of other WordPress nuggets to share as well. Hope you enjoy it!
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🗞️ Within WordPress News
Here’s what I saw happening this past week:
- The biggest news of the week obviously is Envato being sold to Shutterstock. I’ve never really liked Envato products and see the vast majority of the WordPress themes sold there synonymous to bloated themes. Harsh, maybe, but for someone focussing his work entirely on building fast and performant WordPress solutions, I’ve never seen that happen “the right way” with Themeforest products. Anyway, James Giroux used to work at Envato and shares his thoughts on the $245M deal in an extensive article.
I’m hoping this will prompt a lot of authors on that platform to go independent and connect (much better) with the WordPress Community and ultimately create much better products for WordPress. The right way. Again, harsh maybe, but I hope that’s where this will go.
But what are your thoughts? Will this be a positive or a negative thing for the WordPress Community?
- I mentioned Eric Mann’s efforts to self host in last week’s edition, but it seems there’s a movement now with John James Jacoby doing the same.
I like how JJJ is using a Raspberry Pi for this!
- Listen, did you know that Gravity SMTP supports detailed email tracking within the WordPress dashboard, displaying email status, send time, recipient email addresses, plugin source, and more? Well, now you do.
- Automatic CSS was updated to version 3.0. If you’re not familiar with it, think of it as a WordPress specific CSS library. Especially great when combined with page builders such as Bricks. Kevin Geary, its creator, explains in this 101 video its philosophy, features, and fundamentals.
- Namespaces have been around in PHP for longer than a decade, but if you find yourself not using it, have a look at Ronald Huereca’s article explaining both the concept and why you should use them in PHP.
- Part two of Brian’s video on the Interactivity API is up. Brian covers HTML directives, how interactivity between blocks is handled, and how the API (and it’s development process) compare to alternatives inside and outside WP.
- Anders Norén found himself with a weekend with nothing to do and no distractions. Why should you care? Well, he decided to spend the weekend building a new free Full Site Editor theme and log the entire experience. Lots of learning points for anyone looking to understand our new theme paradigm.
- I’ve long advocated for WordPress to have one release per year focussed entirely on just fixing things and not introducing new things resulting in this proposal. In the past weeks, this topic was discussed again (for instance by this short and sweet post by Rich Tabor) on the socials lately, and even Matt Mullenweg even weighed in. James Giroux collected the chatter and added his thoughts to it in a blog post.
Very curious what your thoughts are on this? Let me know in the comments!
- Simone Maranzana recently launched Advanced Columns and shared learnings on how to sell a digital product (with Lemon Squeezy).
- Marcus Burnette created yet another great addition to The WP World website and will now show pleases to eat and hang out close to where your next WordCamp is happening!
- Automattic is building a AI website builder for WordPress called Big Sky. No idea what that will look like, but it’s peaking my curiosity. You can sign up here.
- Custom Aspect Ratios for images are coming to the Block Editor!
- Learn what patterns are and dive into the various use cases where you will apply them in your themes is live now on the WordPress Developer blog.
🚀 Performance & Security
- Just a very solid reminder that doing performance is not a checklist
- WebPerformance is crucial for user satisfaction and engagement. A fast site reduces stress and increases user interaction. We all know this by now, right? Optimizing JavaScript via minification, async & defer attributes, and code splitting can significantly improve loading times, and all that. Lots of more Web Performance 101 here.
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
Gravity SMTP, by Gravity Forms, is finally here to make sure your WordPress site’s emails actually get where they need to go! Whether it’s password resets, new user sign-ups, or form notifications, it connects with reliable email services to boost delivery rates.
This means less worrying about missed communications and more happy users engaging with your site and that’s exactly what you need, right?
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 find: you can control the order in which the browser paints text fill + stroke. So you can draw the stroke first, then fill over top.
- Lesley (of NewsletterGlue fame) shared an interesting observation on how social media channels evolved to just media channels.
- CSS find: Disable scrollbars when this dialog is both a modal, and open No JS, no state, no classes, no aria labels – just a few lines of CSS
- Follow Creators, Not Platforms with https://grayjay.app/
- A all-new Figma 101 course is now live and it’s completely free!
🎁 Bonus
🎙️ A new Within WordPress podcast has been published. I sat down with Tom Raef, a veteran WordPress Security specialist. We talked about all the different angles there are to security within WordPress. Highly recommend you check it out as I guarantee you’ll learn something new (and vital!)
That’s it for this week’s edition of Within WordPress. Thanks for reading!
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