It’s been a relatively quiet week, but with a few high impact things that caught my eyes. Some stuff you really need to check out.
BTW, if you’re considering getting my
Anyway, hope you enjoy this week’s news!
🗞️ Within WordPress News
Here’s what I saw happening this past week:
- For many of us, LocalWP is the tool we use for local development for WordPress. It’s a wonderful tool which just works out of the box. But… what if you need to add more PHP extensions than what it provides? Well, Per Søderlind
pointed out there is a way .
- One of the other tools for local dev is Studio by WordPress.com. It recently added Blueprints, a featured that instead of setting up a WordPress development environment from scratch, helps you define a reusable “recipe” that installs your favorite plugins, activates a theme, applies site settings, and more.
Nick Diego shared more about that .
- OllieWP just keeps improving. Mike McAlister shared the latest and greatest, called Ollie Pro Extensions. Ollie Pro Extensions supercharge WordPress’s Block editor with responsive grids, animations, and interactive buttons, enabling fast, code-free design upgrades
directly in the editor .
- Speaking of tools that are super cool to work with to build awesome stuff on WordPress: Kevin Geary‘s
Etch page builder (which syncs perfectly back to the Block Editor 😍) released the third Alpha version of its 1.0.0 version. Exciting stuff, and pretty damn amazing to see what’s possible with it. Truly is.
BTW, if you want to see real world examples of what you can do with it, check out
- Austin Ginder keeps improving
_do , a collection of useful command line utilities. The latest addition allows you to loop through plugins to find the culprit plugin.
- Matt Cromwell shares a sharp, forward-thinking advice for WordPress product creators
in his 2026-focused guide . Matt is urging a shift from bloated plugins to lean, AI-enhanced tools that prioritize privacy and seamless integrations. Great read!
- Speaking of Matts, Matt, of the Medeiros kind, launched a video series on The WP Minute aiming to help agencies navigate the land of WordPress on a variety of topics. This being the first.
- WPVIP’s
Real-Time Collaboration (VIP RTC) enables multiple users to edit the same WordPress content simultaneously, using the Block Editor. Team members can collaborate on Posts, Pages, and Custom Post Types with near-instant updates, seeing each other’s changes as they type and configure content.
I don’t know how I have missed that one, but this is essentially what phase 3 of the Gutenberg project is supposed to deliver. I think.
- Nobody likes a WordPress Dashboard that nags you left, right, and stacked with tons of notices. Dave Grey has a solution for that. It’s called:
Nag Me Not for WordPress . He’s had it out there for a while, but this week saw a bunch of extra features added.
- If you didn’t know, Automattic has a Special Projects team. Nathan Wrigley recently did
a podcast interview with team members Christy Nyiri and Mike Straw, and it was super fun to listen to and learn what they’re up to.
🤖 WordPress & AI
- This curated collection of slash commands, CLAUDE.md templates, and agent workflows in this
awesome-claude-code GitHub repo help you unlock Anthropic’s Claude.
- Jamie Marsland shared his favorite collection of Telex (AI) generated Blocks over on the
WordPress.com YouTube channel . Fun to see what’s possible there.
🚀 Performance & Security
- With Black Friday coming up, I thought it’d be good to write out
how to fix WooCommerce performance .
💡 Interesting Finds
- Played with this, and it’s fun! How to
connect and use ChatGPT with Spotify . - Absolutely not related to the web or dev, but this was a very interesting read:
Darwinians are so wrong. Lamarck was right: the inheritance of acquired fitness ! - This week I read about how Cloudflare went about fixing the performance of their workers. This work was triggered by YouTuber Theo doing a comparison between Cloudflare’s Workers and Vercel. It’s a great look into where you can improve performance / things even though you thought all was fine.
Highly recommend you read this article.
🛒 WooCommerce News
- WooCommerce can be quite performant out of the box. Don’t let them tell you otherwise. It is, however, super easy to screw things up by
doing_it_wrong().Querying order data incorrectly, for instance, can easily cripple your site. - WooCommerce 10.2 introduces Order Fulfillments (Beta). Brian Coords walks us through
what that means in this video .
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