We’ve got a full edition again! Lots of cool things happening in the world of WordPress this past week. Lots of cool solutions being created and shared and I love it. It’s a very large portion of what WordPress is to me.
Hope you enjoy it!
🗞️ Within WordPress News
Here’s what I saw happening this past week:
- Not everyone is fully aware what the distinction is between the Block Editor and the Site Editor (Full Site Editing). Mike McAlister over at OllieWP
does a really good explanation .
Note: Where Mike references “Gutenberg”, he really is talking about “the Block Editor”. Project Gutenberg, via its plugin, produced two solutions: the Block Editor + the Site Editor. Those two have been merged into Core, but Project Gutenberg continues to work on new products.
Important semantic distinction IMHO.
- Andy Fragen, the creator of Git Updater, has released Git Updater Lite. It solves an issue with the Git Updater. You see, Lite only needs to query an update server run by the developer. Since the update server, and Git Updater, does all the heavy lifting. The user has much less overhead and is able to gather the data in the proper format from the update server via a single REST API endpoint for each plugin or theme.
Read up on it here .
- In a podcast I recorded with Tammie Lister yesterday (to be released soon) I literally mentioned two plugins that I’d love to see in Core. Elements of one of those is actually being considered now
and needs your feedback ! Personally, I’d like to see the entire plugin being merged.
- Another thing Tammie and I talked about (you’ll really want to check out this podcast when it’s released) is Tammie’s favorite new WordPress feature Data Views. Data Views just saw
a huge update in the Gutenberg 19.8 version of plugin , btw. You should learn what it does and what you can build with it. It’s quite fantastic.
- I noticed
Kinsta offering plugin update management now . And that’s an interesting direction they’re going now with their MyKinsta suite. I wonder how many hosts are going to adopt this functionality.
What are you using for plugin management {{ subscriber.first_name | strip | default: “” }}? And do you like this being part of your hosting dashboard?
- WooCommerce saw both the
9.3.x and 9.4.x releases this week because of security fixes improving URL handling, event data validation, and guest checkout controls.
BTW,
- Joost de Valk updated
his article about AVIF and WebP social share images . Check it out to see that you can now safely use WebP for share images everywhere!
AVIF? Well… I’m less and less convinced there’s actually a benefit to that format and that we should have it in Core.
- Brian Coords launched a new podcast called
Webmasters with Brian Coords . I very much enjoyed the first episode which is an interview with Mike McAlister.
- Now, none of my or my client’s sites are hosted at WordPress.com. But seeing
Studio , the local development tool by Automattic , now supporting pull and push sites functionality is a great addition to see released.
- This week I learned we can pass through a negative hook.
Thanks for sharing , Slava Abakumov!
Oh, and I learned another thing from Slava this week on how you can save around 0.2MB of memory per each request by instructing WordPress to skip a bunch of localization/translation logic
- I am 🤏🏻 close to adding a dedicated Robert DeVore section in my newsletter as the man just keeps knocking out great little plugins 😅. These two stand out from this week:
Table Block Enhancer for WordPress . This free WordPress plugin is designed to supercharge the default WordPress Table block, which is really lacking in features. Introducing Media File Versioning for WordPress . This plugin helps you keep your images, PDFs, or other assets organized by keeping track of file updates with minimal effort on your part.
Such. Great. Plugins.
- Speaking of great plugins, one of my absolute favorite plugins in the Block Editor next to Block Visibility (mentioned above) and Icon Block, is
Advanced Query Loop . Version 4.0.0 is out with taxonomy controls! The new Taxonomy Query Builder gives you fine grain control over your taxonomy queries AND I LOVE IT. Thanks Ryan Welcher!
🚀 Performance & Security
- AWS announces
Aurora DSQL , a new distributed SQL database that promises virtually unlimited scalability - One of the best 2FA plugins for WordPress is “
Two Factor “. It’s seen a huge update this week. (If you need something more comprehensive, do check out Calvin Alkan‘s Fortress Solution. - 📺 Learn about robots.txt files, robots meta tags, and how search engines crawl your website in
this video . - 📺 Debugging LCP issues just got easier!
See it in action .
🔆 Within WordPress Highlight
A lot of you are not ready for a Site Editor Block-based theme. And I get that. Maybe the step you need is something in between. A hybrid approach.
Well, luckily for you, there’s a way to start using all the goodies available to those building Block Themes in your classic WordPress themes. Here’s how to create
(That said, if you’re starting from scratch, I highly recommend you “just” go for a Block-based theme)
💡 Interesting Finds
- I’m sure you’ve heard about Spotify Wrapped, but did you know there’s also
CSS Wrapped ? Pretty cool to see what was made available in 2024.
Ⓦ Within WordPress Update
I’ve been running my newsletter and podcast for almost 2 years straight now. I’ve gone from Remkus’ Ramblings to Inside WordPress to Within WordPress. The content for the podcast has mostly been the same in sharing conversations with known and unknown people in our wonderful WordPress Community.
The newsletter has slowly evolved into what you see now; a collection of news about WordPress, WordPress solutions, and WordPress tools. Somewhere early next year I’m going to add a third component to Within WordPress. I’m quite excited about with what lies ahead and I’ll be slowly sharing bits and pieces of what the next big step for Within WordPress will be.
I know, I know… whole lotta words without actually saying something, but I promise you it’ll be good. It will deepen and strengthen and deepen both the podcast and newsletter.
Thank you to all of you for subscribing, reading, listening, commenting and sharing lovely praises!
That’s it for this week’s edition of Within WordPress. Thanks for reading!
Best, Remkus
P.s., I’ll be releasing a lot of podcasts in the upcoming weeks. So stay tuned: https://remkusdevries.com/podcast
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