So… my biggest goal for this newsletter today is to not have typos, missing links, and leftover newsletter template sections 😅.
I’m half kidding, as it’s pretty much all about sharing useful information, but I acknowledge those things can be annoying. So I’m doing my best to avoid them while accepting I am also accepting that I am human, and I make mistakes just like you.
I’ve had a crazy busy week
Here we go!
🗞️ Within WordPress News
Here’s what I saw happening this past week:
- Let’s start with the most important one: the
June 2025 roundup for WordPress developers includes updates to the Font Library API, block bindings improvements, Plugin Checker enhancements, and early work on the Admin redesign. A solid overview of what’s shipping and where things are headed for WordPress.
- Torsten Landsiedel is working on
a cool plugin that allows you to hide certain blocks from an RSS feed . Help him out if you can, or check out his plugin on GitHub (for the moment).
- The team at Ollie (Mike McAlister and Patrick Posner) have released an incredibly complete video course that will make you
harness the full power of WordPress’s site editor , global styles, and block patterns.
They say it allows you to create themes that users actually want to use. I don’t know about that 😛, but it’s a wonderful course. Highly recommend for ANYONE would like to understand WordPress better.
- I’ve mentioned
Edge Images by Jono Alderson before, but a repeat is warranted. Jono’s been improving the plugin quite a bit since he released it. And with the latest release, it now supports local transformation, fancy CSS for rendering management, and all sorts of bells and whistles .
- WooCommerce 9.9 has shipped, and it is noticeably faster on pretty much all counts. I’ve mentioned that before, but for today’s newsletter I want to look at a new feature that’s included in beta.
Blueprints import/export .
This feature will make setting up WooCommerce sites so much faster and efficient. Love it.
- Speaking of WooCommerce, you used to be limited to one product per checkout URL in WooCommerce. But in the upcoming version 10.0, that’s all changing.
You’ll be able to add multiple products, custom quantities, and even coupons via a single URL. Huge for marketing, bundles, and streamlined carts.
- He couldn’t help himself, but Brian Gardner made a new theme, yet again 😛. It’s called
Baselayer and it’s super minimalistic. And yet, fuly powered by the Block Editor.
Fun fact: it was Brian who (unknowingly at the time) pulled me into the WordPress proper. I’ve rocked his Detour theme for ages on my personal blog.
- Marcel Tannich gave a talk at WCEU where he shared
his graphic interface for WP CLI . Well, sorta. It’s not gone back to being the WordPress Dashboard and all, but it’s a slick way to generate WP CLI command for WordPress. For instance, create optimized “install WordPress” scripts.
- If you run WordPress Multisite,
Multisyde is worth a look. It lets you activate or deactivate plugins across the network without visiting each site, and adds a handy last-login timestamp for every user.
Small touches, big quality-of-life upgrade.
- James LePage announced
WordPress MCP v0.2.0 , a protocol project led by Vidu Galatan. This release adds streamable transport and JWT authentication. Early steps toward more secure, flexible communication between WordPress services.
Check out
- Austin Ginder is consolidating years of WordPress bash scripts into a new standalone CLI:
CaptainCore Do . It’s 100% open source, MIT licensed, and built to streamline WP site management from the terminal.
Can’t express how much of a fan I am of all things WP CLI / Bash 😍.
- LoopConf is back, and all the
details just dropped for the premier conference focused on professional WordPress development. Sign up to get notified when tickets go on sale. You’ll want in.
- ACF now lets you
add custom icons to the Icon Picker field . Absolutely perfect for branded UI, custom sets, or design systems that need more than the defaults.
- Andrew Hoyer resurfaced
Meta Trac ticket #2642 , which highlights how WordPress plugin search still struggles with phrase and exact name matching. Even after 8 years. Despite small improvements, exact match still isn’t prioritized. For small plugin devs, this can be a real discoverability blocker.
🚀 Performance & Security
- Patchstack are rocking the WordPress scene left and right lately, for instance with their
Patchstack AI code review tool and Security Suite for plugin vendors. They have also made Patchstack a lot more flexible to freelancers and agencies as well. Lower entry point , smaller incremental upgrades.
- Felix Arntz from the Core Performance Team
announced the release of the View Transitions plugin . This latest plugin from the team is replacing the hard page loads between URLs with smooth animations to improve UX.
🔆 Within WordPress Highlight
Tammie Lister reflects on
💡 Interesting Finds
- The file converter you’ll love is called
Vert . All image, audio, and document processing is done on your device. Videos are converted on our lightning-fast servers. No file size limit, no ads, and completely open source.
- If LLM internals leave you cross-eyed, this interactive explainer by Brendan Bycroft is a must-see. It walks through the math, layers, and architecture behind large language models in a clear, visual way.
Dive in here for one of the best breakdowns around.
- Wild new idea from Saleban Olow:
Memvid stores millions of text chunks inside an MP4 file. No database needed. You still get fast semantic search, all in a 100% open-source package.
Vector DBs might just have competition 🤯
- Rino de Boer just launched
Website Style Kit . It’s a color palette generator made specifically for web design. Unlike branding-focused or overly complex tools, this one generates balanced light and dark palettes from a single brand color, bakes in good contrast, and includes a typography switcher with popular Google Fonts. Clean, simple, and free. Built because he needed it themselves.
- OpenAI just open-sourced a
UI testing agent demo that uses its Computer-Using Agent (CUA) model, the Responses API, and Playwright to automate frontend testing. A promising glimpse at how LLMs might handle real-world UI QA tasks.
📚 Courses
I’ve already told this to a couple of people at WCEU, but I’m finally back in full swing with my courses. The first one I’ll release is Make WordPress Fast (working title still, I guess 🤔 ), and I’ve listed the rest, but I’d love some feedback on certain preferences in the coming weeks. This is my first question to you:
🎁 Bonus
🎙️ The Within WordPress podcast featured Raquel Manriquez. This is her second appearance, but first time as the organizer of PressConf. We talk about what worked, what didn’t, and what the next edition will be like. We also touched a bit on what my talk was about, and I was incredibly honored to learn it was Raquel’s favorite. Learn why that was.
That’s it for this week’s edition of Within WordPress. Thanks for reading!
Best, Remkus
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