Well, that was a good and full week. At least for me. Made some real good progress on two consultancy projects I’m doing (for two different WordPress companies. Plus, I was on Kevin Geary‘s WWD live stream where we talked about WordPress Performance pretty much from every single angle. More than 3K views so far, so yeah, check out how we talked about 90 minutes about how to build blazingly fast WordPress sites.
Lots of other WordPress news as well; hope you enjoy it!
🗞️ Within WordPress News
Here’s what I saw happening this past week:
- WordPress 6.9 Beta 2 is here, and betas are for testing, so make sure you have a local development site going and test your favorite tools.
- Disembark is a really cool project by Austin Ginder, which I have featured before. In short, it’s an open-source backup tool for WordPress websites. Now, I know we’ve got plenty of those plugins, but what I like about this one is a fully featured CLI for this. And that’s where backups should live anyway. Check out what he’s been adding!
It’s even got sync coming!
- Simple time tracking living in WordPress. Sounds just like the thing you need? Well, Dave Grey‘s got your back then with ClickTock.
Now, don’t go and think this means I now think we should do all the things in WordPress. That’s still a hard “No“.
- WordPress 6.9 will introduce an Accordion block. Did you know? Learn how to style them here. And here’s code to add Schema microdata to it.
- Riad Benguella figured correctly that every single Block developer at some point wonders, “Why are all of these scripts are loading?!”. This is why he’s created a way to debug them.
- Patchstack is building really cool integrations. They now offer a Web Host integration that scans and auto-patching via their seamless dashboard.
- I am not a Bricks user, but if you are, and you’re building sites with WooCommerce, do check out Sinan’s Brick’s child theme that handles this expertly.
That said, he’s also got a Block theme for you to check out.
- The Plugin Check plugin, the one you should be using when uploading a new plugin to the WordPress repo, just got an EXCELLENT addition. It will now also create automatic security reports after each plugin update 😍
- The Interactivity API is still heavily underused. But lucky for us, Ryan Welcher streamed how to make use of every single API feature.
- Matt Mullenweg shared a stealthy revival of the Wayback Machine for WordPress, empowering publishers to capture and store site snapshots on demand via a simple plugin, shielding content from fleeting web threats while unlocking instant rollbacks to dodge data loss or censorship in an era of digital volatility.
NO MORE LINKROT!!
- Check out Ian Svoboda‘s latest article on “Learn WP Theme Dev: Setting Up a Child Theme for Hybrid or Block Themes.” This is a great read, especially if you’re new to block themes and unsure how a child theme fits in these days.
🤖 WordPress & AI
- Tammie Lister wrapped up Blocktober, and I gotta say, she shared some really fun blocks. If you haven’t yet, check out the site and get inspired how you can create your own with Telex.
- This week, the inaugural event of dev/ai/nyc is being organized by Automattic. I’m very curious to learn what will be discussed at this event, where they will be “exploring the future of the open web and human-centered AI”. If you’re in the neighborhood, you can technically still make it.
- Jonathan Bossenger’s demo repo arms WordPress devs with plug-and-play custom instructions for GitHub Copilot in its .github/copilot-instructions.md file, embedding standards, hooks, workflows, and troubleshooting to slash guesswork, enforce best practices, and crank out reliable plugin code at warp speed.
More of these, please!
🚀 Performance & Security
- Perfmatters introduced the perfmatters_rucss_inline_stylesheets filter. This allows you to inline any stylesheet already excluded from used CSS. See more on how to optimize used CSS exclusions.
- You can now debug a complete performance trace with Gemini! Once you’ve recorded a trace, you can chat with Gemini about the entire trace, related performance insights, and even connected field data.
🔆 Within WordPress Highlight
What’s new for WordPress developers, October 2025 edition, was mentioned before, but it bears repeating. Think admin-wide Command Palette navigation, a Terms Query block for taxonomies, content-only pattern edits, block visibility toggles, and beefed-up collaborative Notes in the October developer roundup, plus PHP Playground beta for instant browser testing toward WP 6.9.
And this time, we have the video version of this as well:
💡 Interesting Finds
- Framecap. Super cool screen recording tool that is CLI based. Not sure if it will make me move away from Screen.Studio for screen recording, but still very cool.
- From Zeldman’s blog: Receipts: a brief list of prominent articles proclaiming the death of the web. Cuz, yeah… it ain’t dead. Not by a long shot.
- Researchers uncover critical flaws in Comet, an AI-powered browser, allowing attackers to hijack sessions, steal data, and execute remote code via manipulated prompts, as exposed in their detailed report—urging immediate patches to thwart widespread exploitation of its LLM integrations. Honest question, was it vibe-coded? 😓
- CSS debugging just got a major update in Chrome.
🛒 WooCommerce News
- There are a bunch of things you can do with the Interactivity API as Ryan showed us above. And as such, it makes all the sense that WooCommerce is leaning in hard for their Blocks.
- Join this conversation about the extensibility principles of WooCommerce. I’m pretty sure that if you build for WooCommerce, you’ll have an opinion about this.
- Brian Coords recorded a video for the WooCommerce channel, diving deep into the MCP beta that is part of WooCommerce 10.3. Genuinely love where MCP are going with both WordPress and Woo. This will unlock so so much.
That’s it for this week’s edition of Within WordPress. Thanks for reading!
Best, Remkus
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