This upcoming week it’s Black Friday. I’m sure I’m not telling you anything new here. I’ll be at WordCamp Netherlands (come say hi if you’re there!). I’ll be curious to see how many will have laptops on their, you know, laps to check how their clients’s sites are doing! 😅
Anyway, before we hit the busiest weekend of the year, let’s catch up on a long list of great WordPress news, shall we? Lots of WordPress 6.9 essentials!
Hope you enjoy it!
🗞️ Within WordPress News
Here’s what I saw happening this past week:
- WordPress 6.9 RC2 just landed and it’s begging for your clicks! Grab it, poke every new feature, break things (politely), and drop your feedback so the final release can be pure fire. Testers (which is all of YOU!), this is your moment to dive in and help shape 6.9.
Do check out Birgit’s WordPress 6.9 Source of Truth as well to learn more about WordPress 6.9.
- The Abilities API is a first-class, cross-context functional API that other tools and applications can use to interface with WordPress. It’s part of WordPress 6.9, and you owe it to yourself to figure out how this API can help your workflows. Because it’s not just for adding AI to WordPress.
- Have you ever wished you could add post-specific blocks in more than one location? For instance, post-specific blocks that appear in a sidebar as well as the main post content area? That’s exactly what Ian Svoboda‘s plugin called Content Area Block handles. Pretty nifty!
- The ever-awesome Justin Nealey released a plugin called DesignSetGo. It’s a collection of 46 blocks that allow you to build layouts, forms, interactive elements, and stunning visuals right inside the native block editor.
And I love that he’s built them with a “performance first” mindset. 😍
- The first beta of ACF Pro 6.7 dropped, and it allows for inline editing for ACF Blocks; making working with ACF Blocks live, instant, and intuitive.
And yes, to this day, ACF Blocks are, for me, still the way to go for custom blocks.
- I generally don’t recommend judging a hosting company on how good their support is (I like to approach judging them from a purist, performance-related pov), but when I saw 20i hosting achieving the HIGHEST PC Pro score across all categories… well, that’s impressive.
- Tareq Hasan wrote a simple but cool guide on how to use Cloudflare Tunnel with your WordPress site. Begone, ngrok!
- There’s a big change coming in WordPress 7.0 with full iframe isolation for the editor. This starts with compatibility tweaks in 6.9 that flag legacy blocks and enforce apiVersion 3 in block.json, all to shield the canvas from admin CSS clashes so edits match front-end rendering precisely.
This matters because it slashes styling headaches for block and theme creators, unlocks true responsive behaviors like viewport units, and delivers a smoother, more accurate editing flow that future-proofs sites without endless compatibility hacks.
- Brian Coords compared the arrival of DataViews and DataForm and such into WordPress 6.9 akin to there now finally being a Fields API of sort in core. I think he’s right.
- I know a lot of you have clients that want to switch ESPs for better ROI, features, and support. The main blocker: migrating automations, forms, templates, and emails is stressful and time-consuming. Omnisend solves this by doing the migration for their customers, so switching doesn’t feel like moving day chaos. They make the moving suck less, and the setup scales with the account size. Get 30% off on all plans for 3 months with the code BFCM-2025.
- My good friend Anne-Mieke Bovelett wrote an article on the WordPress Developer Blog about the importance of a good changelog. I mean, is there something worse than “We’ve made improvements and squashed bugs so this plugin is even better for you”? Yeah, I don’t think so.
- Looks like Ollie Pro will be the choice going forward when building FSE & WooCommerce sites. Check out Mike’s post on X.
- WordPress 6.9 drops 77 accessibility wins: instant screen-reader upload alerts, zero keyboard traps, sharper contrasts, and semantic upgrades that make compliance effortless for devs. Sites become truly inclusive overnight!
🤖 WordPress & AI
- Version 0.1.x of the WordPress AI Client SDK was announced by Felix Arntz. This SDK is the easiest way to integrate generative AI into your plugins.
🚀 Performance & Security
- WordPress 6.9 will drop a massive performance glow-up! We’re talking fetchpriority hints on scripts, way more inlined CSS, auto-minified theme styles, on-demand block CSS for classic themes, a slick new template output buffer, and a bunch more goodies that make sites scream. Check out all the details in the Frontend Performance field guide!
- One of the unsafest and performance-hitting things you can do in WordPress is run snippets via plugin. That is, until today. Because Perfmatters 3.5.3 now lets you add PHP, CSS, JS, and HTML snippets with zero performance drag. They built the feature from scratch using a flat-file system, no database queries on the front end, so it stays lightning-fast, ultra-secure, and never slows down your site.
- WordPress 6.9’s Streaming Block Parser processes posts token-by-token, cutting memory use from gigabytes to kilobytes on complex content while accelerating server-side rendering. It replaces fragile regex with a reliable API for partial scans, boosting speed and stability.
🔆 Within WordPress Highlight
Tired of endless hunts for that one WordPress plugin to nail a specific task? Ploogins flips the script with AI that listens to your description, say, “seamless contact forms with spam shields”, and instantly recommends top free or premium matches, complete with comparisons to save you hours of digging.
💡 Interesting Finds
- Kevin Powell explains everything you need to know about modern CSS colors.
- Over on the GitHub blog, they wrote about how to write great agents.md files.
- Nils Binder explains how to create timetable layouts using modern CSS features like grid, subgrid, round(), and mod().
- Dive into the latest advancements in CSS with state-based container queries on the CSS Podcast.
- Master Scroll-Driven Animations in a 10-part video course over on the Chrome for Developers blog.
🛒 WooCommerce News
- Rhys Wynne shared a solution to prevent malicious WooCommerce (attempts) of orders. Wonderful case of Cloudflare to the rescue.
- The Reddit for WooCommerce integration is now available, making it easier for WooCommerce merchants to reach Reddit’s high-intent shopping audience.
🔎 Scanfully Updates
We’re beta testing our Priority Pages feature currently. Because let’s not pretend you only care about the uptime and performance of your frontpage, right? Right. Go ahead and test it out. More information on this new feature will drop soon.
That’s it for this week’s edition of Within WordPress. Thanks for reading!
Best, Remkus
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