In case you hadn’t noticed, today’s Black Friday. Total shock, right? Crazy how it snuck up on us again, like it does literally every single year on the exact same date 😏
I’ll let others handle the Black Friday deal overviews, but you can visit every single tool I link below or any of the sponsors of this newsletter and find great deals on their sites for today.
That said, the majority of today’s newsletter is focused on the upcoming release of WordPress 6.9 (next week) and new WordPress AI solutions you need to be aware of.
Hope you enjoy it!
🗞️ Within WordPress News
Here’s what I saw happening this past week:
- As we’re inching closer to the WordPress 6.9 release party, scheduled on the same day as this year’s State of the Word, we have one final (I think?) testing version of WordPress 6.9 to run through the mills.
RC 3 .
- I already shared the WordPress Performance Field Guide for 6.9 in my previous newsletter (on repeat below), but we now also have the full
Field Guide for WordPress 6.9 .
If you’re going to read anything today, let it be this one!
PHP 8.5 is here! And, all known PHP 8.5 incompatibilities in WordPress Core have been fixed for the WordPress 6.9 release scheduled for December 2. The release will have “beta support” for 8.5 (the label used for PHP versions with less than 10% adoptions across all WP sites).
- WordPress 6.9 will start warning you if your blocks
aren’t on the v3 of the Blocks API , btw.
Cimo , my favorite free instant-image-optimizer by Benjamin Intal, dropped a massive upgrade with full Video & Audio Optimization and the launch of Cimo Premium. No server scripts. No third-party sending of files. Unlimited optimizations. Your site & server stays fast. Your storage stays clean.
The upgrade we were waiting for, and the premium version we knew was going to come.
NitroPack , one of my favorite performance tool, have a great BFCM deal. If you’ve been thinking about speeding up your site, now’s the time: up to 30% off until Dec 7 with code CYBERMONTH2025 (or CYBERYEAR2025 for annual). It’s the easiest way I know to get those Core Web Vitals in the green 👉 nitropack.io/
- Ian Svoboda‘s been on a roll with great content. This week’s is about
adding multiple block content areas to a single block templat e. This is remarkably complex out of the box, but because he loves you all ( his words , not mine), he made a really simple way to do it.
- Juliette Reinders Folmer announced the release of
WordPress Coding Standards, version 3.3.0 .
- The
Custom Document Folder plugin for WordPress brings effortless organization: simply enable PDF and DOCX extensions, and from then on every PDF lands neatly in /wp-content/uploads/pdf/, every DOCX goes straight to /wp-content/uploads/docx/, while all other files keep using the familiar date-based folders clean, automatic, and delightfully simple.
Yet another wonderful little plugin by Per Søderlind.
- Ronald Huereca is busy building the next version of his Pattern Wrangler plugin, and he bundled all his learnings into
this wonderful blog post . This is how it’s done.
Do also check out his other article:
🤖 WordPress & AI
- Amadeu Arderiu launched an
experimental clone of the WordPress Plugins Directory packed with smart upgrades: AI-driven semantic search that truly understands natural language queries, side-by-side plugin comparison, refined sorting and ordering of results, instant AI-generated insights with concise summaries, and a dedicated “Related Plugins” tab that surfaces the best alternatives and companions.
I can see this become the next version of our repo easily.
- James LePage shared examples on
how to use Abilities API for AI in WordPress on his blog.
- The
MCP Adapter version v0.3.0 is arriving as the official WordPress integration for the Model Context Protocol (MCP), exposing WordPress abilities (registered via the Abilities API).
- The WordPress AI team shared the first public release of the
AI Experiments plugin (version 0.1.0). This new canonical plugin provides a home for exploring experimental AI-powered features and integration patterns.
🚀 Performance & Security
- The link didn’t work in the last episode, so sharing again: WordPress 6.9 will drop a massive performance improvement! 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 !
- Weston Ruter (who also wrote the above-mentioned Frontend Performance Field Guide) shared
a good collection of related content on his blog .
- I wrote a blog post about
how hosting performance is seldomly as simple as picking a well-known provider and assuming the rest takes care of itself.
🔆 Within WordPress Highlight
“No pitch deck. No roadmap. Just one polite blog post from a frustrated blogger and one thoughtful comment from a stranger an ocean away.”
💡 Interesting Finds
- Josh Comeau shared his article on:
Brand New Layouts with CSS Subgrid - “
Deep work is statistically near-impossible. We’ve normalized an environment where focus has been engineered out of the workday “
🛒 WooCommerce News
WooCommerce 10.4 Beta is out for testing, bringing slick accessibility improvements to carousels and emails, a full rollout of HPOS data caching, and REST API requests that now blaze 30-60ms faster. I’m genuinely impressed by those speed gains, as every millisecond shaved off the API translates directly to snappier admin and checkout experiences.
That’s it for this week’s edition of Within WordPress. Thanks for reading!
Best, Remkus
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