So, yeah… it’s been a while, hasn’t it? I went from an intended 2-week break because of continuous travel to a little while longer without any newsletter. I’ve been plenty busy, though, but I guess I needed a little break 😓. But… I’m back. And on a Wednesday, no less. I’ll stick to this day for the foreseeable future as well.
Two things especially have received a lot of time and focus.
One is reigniting my YouTube channel. I can
🎓 From The Guild
The other is tons and tons of preparation for the launch of The Within WordPress Guild. If you remember, I
🗞️ Within WordPress News
Here’s what I saw happening:
- WordPress saw its worst security flaw ever a few weeks ago. It was in the middle of my vacation in the South of France, but boy did I make sure every single site under my management got updated ASAP to WordPress 7.0.2. If you haven’t updated yet… you’re running huge risks!
- I have published a couple of articles on my blog that I think are well worth your time:
- I saw a trend getting stronger and bigger a few years back that has gotten even more exponential in this age of AI. I’m talking about security breaches. Of course, things like what 7.0.2 fixes, but also backdoor fabrications and whatnot. Austin Ginder
reported bad activity that was such that it was 13 years in the making . THIRTEEN YEARS!
I’m not about put the fear of in you, but you really need to get with this topic as a professional on the web.
- Austin also published
The hall of shame for WordPress admin notices and Anatomy of a WordPress.org supply-chain attack: the six ways in . That man is prolific! I call it #Gindermania and I love it.
- If you are looking for more control over your WordPress updates, Sybre Waaijer released
Troy . Neat-o.
- My friend Pavel Ciorici of WPZOOM fame created a site to that shows Daily rankings and insights for every theme and plugin on WordPress.org. It’s super complete and very insightful, and it’s
ours for the gawking .
- The Awesome Motive team has released
WPVibe . This is one of the first really mature solutions in this space to have your AI talk and do things with your WordPress site.
- BTW, if you haven’t
used the WordPress AI client yet , Rich Tabor explains how to do exactly that.
- Have you seen how
Omnisend solves migration pain for new customers coming from other email & SMS marketing systems? Switching doesn’t feel like moving day chaos because Omnisend makes the move suck less, and the setup scales with the account size. Get 30% off on all plans for 3 months with this special code .
- Daniel Iser:
Every WordPress plugin dev knows the arc: 5-star dreams, 1-star reality, a support queue that never empties, and one acquisition offer that feels like escape.So I built it into a game. Ship versions, survive the tickets, sell out to private equity, prestige, repeat.Leaderboard’s live and a few WP folks are already climbing it. Here’s my run — come take a swing
Check out
- I’ve never been able to gel with Notion, but if that is your thing and you’re missing full control, check out
Cortex . It’s Automattic’s answer to how to solve Notion inside of WordPress.
- AI keeps becoming more and more powerful.
AI Valve hands admins the control plane that’s been missing: granular AI permissions by plugin, token caps, context guardrails, usage analytics, and full request auditing. See exactly which plugins tap AI and decide the boundaries. Built by Per Søderlind.
- In a similar context, you should check out what
Albert for WordPress does. It’s created by fellow Dutchman Mark Jansen, and it looks like a wonderful solution.
- Jake Goldman, Partner at Fueled (formerly 10up) r
eleased a fun WordPress related product , a browser extension that quickly ended up under WordPress’ umbrella. It’s the WordPress browser extension .
🚀 Performance & Security
- The recent version of WooCommerce
delivered solid wins by tackling one of the toughest checkout stress tests out there: BFCM. They tracked down and eliminated a peak-load failure cascade. In their load testing, the block checkout place-order request dropped from a 2.4s median to 0.7s, and checkout handled about ~26% more concurrent load.
- WooCommerce performance is not just page speed. That’s the mistake. A fast store that confuses customers is not performing well .A fast checkout that feels risky is not performing well. A fast site that needs ten plugins to recover abandoned carts is not performing well. Speed matters. But performance is bigger than speed.
That’s the point of my new video .
It’s where I talk about
🔆 Within WordPress Highlight
Sometimes it’s good to look back at WordPress’s origin, writing, and publishing anything. And that’s precisely what Johnnathan Williams did when he released his plugin that allows you to publish a poem while still holding its shape, its intended shape, as poems generally have. Check out
Some of my favorite WordPress tools:
- My two favorite forms for WordPress:
Gravity Forms and WS Form - These are the themes I use:
Ollie , Rockbase and GeneratePress - And, obviously,
Scanfully for all my Site Health & Performance monitoring
💡 Interesting Finds
- TIL that
you can see how many tickets were sold for any particular WordCamp. These are the WCUS ones, and they seem to be expecting up to 1500+ attendees. - If you’re into online publishing and SEO, Brian Morrissey’s newsletter is an absolute must-read. He dives into
why some publishers are so fed up with SEO they’re considering ditching it altogether . And even slamming the door on Google by blocking its crawlers completely! Cloudflare is quietly building the agent cloud
🛒 WooCommerce News
- In the EU we now have the right to withdraw an order, so if you’re running a WooCommerce store, that needs to be offered.
Imran explains expertly how that works. - Not sure how new this is, but there’s a
WooCommerce Product update feed now . - Help Woo
improve the WooCommerce developer docs for core features. - WooCommerce 11.0 is here, and
this is what’s new .
That’s it for this week’s edition of Within WordPress. Thanks for reading!
Best, Remkus
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