WordPress 6.9 in da house! And boy oh boy, is it a good one. Well, the beta is. Lots can still change, but yeah, I’m excited to see this one, as we’ll see countless improvements and additions towards AI integrations and whatnot.
But… I got more stuff for you. Hope you enjoy it!
🗞️ Within WordPress News
Here’s what I saw happening this past week:
- The process for getting WordPress 6.9 has started with the release of the
first beta . And it’s a release full of big changes.
You know the drill;
- The new Template API feature coming to WordPress 6.9 looks solid and will help establish a clear separation between themes and custom templates. There’s still a lot of improvement needed, I think. And Elliott Richmond agrees as
he opened up a ticket to discuss exporting a theme’s custom work.
If you find yourself exporting FSE themes with the
- Finding hidden gems in the WordPress plugin repo is a challenge. Because, how are you going to do that with the tools available there? You’re going to be very limited. Nick Hamze saw the same problem and actually
came up with a great solution .
- WordCamp Canada happened not too long ago, and this recap from Jonathan Desrosiers was a fun read, eh. It’s got a lofty title:
Revitalizing the Stagnant Web .
- Matt Mullenweg did one of his Q&As at the end of WordCamp Canada and there was actually a lot of interesting info shared there. Matt blogged about it here:
https://ma.tt/2025/10/wordcamp-canada/
- My friends over at the WP Product Talk podcast had a great episode with Ian Misner, co-founder of Kestrel talking about prioritization and his lessons from Multi-Product Businesses
Really fun conversation exploring how product companies can juggle competing priorities without losing focus.
- 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.
If this one sounded like I am repeating myself, you’d be right. I pasted the wrong link in last week’s newsletter, so this is me trying again 😛
- Alex Standiford started a bootstrapped business a year ago, which we
talked about in my podcast . He’s now blogged about “ growing, stumbling, and keeping his head above water ” doing that.
- Can we have too many boilerplates for creating plugins for WordPress? Maybe. But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t look at
a new one when it’s being presented . This time by David Allsop.
- Aren’t the best solutions ever born out of frustration? I think they are. Case in point, Joost de Valk shared that they built a Brand Asset Manager to solve this awkward question once and for all: “
Hey, do you have a vector version of your logo? ”
- Speaking of cool plugins, Slava Abakumov shared his new plugin called
Content Randomizer . It allows you to rotate and display random content blocks on every page load. Perfect for testimonials, CTAs, and dynamic content. Supports any block type. That’s a neat plugin, right?
🤖 WordPress & AI
- Em released the WP Ability Toolkit. A toolkit for WordPress plugin development, testing AI agent integrations, and WordPress Ability API creation. More on that
in this GitHub repo .
- I’ve talked about this one before, but WS Form‘s MCP server integration, allowing you to use Claude or ChatGPT for the form builder, is absolutely worth you looking at again. All the info you need is in
this knowledge base article .
Mark also
- The WordPress.org PHP AI Client SDK version 0.2.0 is out now, with several key enhancements and fixes for more developer convenience. Check out the
full list of changes in the release notes .
🚀 Performance & Security
- One of the biggest misconceptions in WordPress is that performance and security are competing priorities, that securing your site means slowing it down. The reality is that a properly secured site almost always performs better. In other words, I blogged about
how to do WordPress Security .
🔆 Within WordPress Highlight
WordPress Playground updates keep coming and recently saw php-wasm integrations for Node.js app runs, CLI stability via auto-mounting, and AI-boosted dev sprints, while OpCache slashes load times by 42% and multi-worker threading tackles concurrency.
This is all detailed in the project’s
Have I said recently how much I love WordPress Playground? Because I do.
💡 Interesting Finds
- My buddy Nathan Wrigley posted this on X: “I have reservations about AI. Not the fact of it, but the implementations of it. This article about the new OpenAI browser highlights some areas where I think we need to tread carefully – giving up access to the web for the ‘OpenAI’ version of the web”, linking to Anil Dash‘s article on
ChatGPT’s browser called Atlas .
🛒 WooCommerce News
- Introducing WooCommerce 10.3!
This version brings exciting updates such as Checkout Address Autocomplete, Cost of Goods Sold monitoring, the Woo MCP beta, and enhanced Product Collections, all designed to elevate functionality and create a better experience for merchants. Enjoy!
- While I have your WooCommerce attention, please let your voice be heard on this proposal:
Reorganize WooCommerce admin menus by merchant jobs-to-be-done
- If you’re not yet sure what this MCP thing is in the context of WooCommerce, check out Jamie Marsland‘s
10 Ways WooCommerce MCP Could Make Your Storefront Actually Exciting .
That’s it for this week’s edition of Within WordPress. Thanks for reading!
Best, Remkus
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