This is a long newsletter. There were so many interesting things to share, and I felt like sharing them! Feels like everyone’s pumping out stuff right before their summer breaks, or something.
I did as well, btw, as I wrote about Custom Database Tables in WordPress, and when to use them.
And, with well over 82% of you wanting me to add a “WordPress & AI” section to the newsletter, so that’s new going forward (when there’s enough to mention).
Anyway, lots of words, but let’s jump in shall we? Hope you enjoy it!
🗞️ Within WordPress News
Here’s what I saw happening this past week:
- The Accessibility Checker got some solid upgrades: instant rescans from the frontend highlighter, filters for which post statuses get scanned, auto‑cleanup for orphaned issues, and improved detection for aria-hidden and redundant alt text. Full details on Equalize Digital’s release notes.
On that general topic, check out their ultimate guide to the European Accessibility Act. It covers all the variances between the EU states as well.
- If you’ve been waiting to try NitroPack, now’s the time. It’s one of my favorite Performance Optimizing tools. And… their new plans now start at just $7/month, giving you access to their powerful performance toolkit plus seven new optimization features.
- You know who’s at it again? Austin Ginder, is who. He finally shared his new project called Cove. Cove is an easy-to-use CLI for managing WordPress locally. It offers instant site creation, isolated environments, and a lightweight workflow designed to get developers building faster without the usual setup friction.
- The WordPress Coding Standards project has released version 3.2.0, bringing new sniffs, updated rulesets, and fixes to help developers maintain cleaner, more consistent codebases.
- The 404 Web by Jeff Starr is a deep dive into how 404 errors shape the web. It explores their technical roots, user experience implications, and why handling them well can make or break a site’s usability and SEO.
- Here’s something that deserves attention: Vikas Singhal from InstaWP has released WP Licenser, a new framework to help WordPress developers easily build licensing systems for their plugins and themes. It handles license generation, validation, and API integration out of the box, making it much simpler to protect and manage premium products. Check out the repository on GitHub for details.
- Kinsta just rolled out a big update: Security Monitoring is now included on all plans, with real-time malware scanning and alerts. Plus, you can now directly access databases through MyKinsta without third-party tools, streamlining site management.
- 📺 Managing dozens of sites across a large network is painful. Greyd.Suite centralizes code, content, and design in WordPress. Using a fictional university build, Jakob Trost shows how one update can roll out across all sites, no workarounds, no bottlenecks.
This is why I love working with Greyd. It’s such a diverse problem solver.
- Customizer CSS is convenient, but it bloats your page head and can’t be cached. So, Matt Cromwell built a tiny snippet to fix that. Real CSS, real file. Cleaner, faster, no child theme needed.
- The roadmap for WordPress 6.9 highlights big priorities: evolving the Site Editor, refining content creation, expanding the Command Palette across WordPress, introducing early previews for a new Admin experience, and delivering developer-focused updates like an MCP Adapter and a PHP AI Client.
🤖 WordPress & AI
So, while we’re on that topic…
- Felix Arntz announced that AI Services version 0.7.0 is now available! This release adds text-to-speech and speech generation capabilities, as well as web search support to applicable providers. And, for the first time since launch, new providers were added, with Mistral, Perplexity, xAI.
Still on that topic:
- James LePage from the Make WordPress AI team announced a new PHP AI Client. It brings AI integration directly into WordPress development, offering a simple, standardized way to connect PHP projects with AI services. It’s built for core compatibility and extensibility, making it easier for plugins and themes to tap into AI-powered workflows.
And this may have you wondering what the overlap between Felix’s AI Services plugin and the PHP API client may be. Well, in Felix’s words:
You may be wondering how AI Services fits into the new WordPress AI Team: The new PHP AI Client SDK is heavily inspired by it. In the long term, AI Services will either become a canonical plugin, or its features will be ported into new canonical plugins.
- Elementor is planning to release Angie, the first(?) AI plugin for WordPress. And you don’t need to run Elementor on your WordPress site to be able to run this!
- And then there’s Hostinger, who just launched its AI Site Manager for WordPress. It’s an all-in-one tool that combines AI-driven site building, management, and content creation. It aims to streamline setup and ongoing maintenance, making it easier for users to design, edit, and optimize WordPress sites without touching code.
I guess this is happening now, huh?
- An AI code reviewer, who’s not looking for one? Well, if you like working with Gemini code Assist for GitHub, then Weston Ruter‘s got your back.
🚀 Performance & Security
- WordPress 6.9 is shaping up to be a serious performance release, with the roadmap to 6.9 outlining work on fetchpriority for scripts, smarter output buffering, bfcache improvements, and better CSS minification and inlining.
- If you’re curious about block manifests and how they can improve plugin and WordPress performance, Ronald Huereca as written a detailed guide on what they are and how to use them in your block plugin.
- The State of HTML survey is now live. Tell them what you love, what you hate, and what you wish existed by taking the State of HTML survey →.
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
🔆 Within WordPress Highlight
Magic Mike McAlister is building a really cool solution that allows for us to not only easily add Mega Menus to your FSE themes, but also super easily create a dedicated mobile menu. My friend Jamie Marsland shows you how in his exclusive preview:
💡 Interesting Finds
- Stop wrestling with CSS, because Chrome DevTools now includes an AI Assistance panel that provides AI-powered style insights and even suggests bug fixes, making CSS debugging a whole lot easier.
🛒 WooCommerce
- Here’s a big update from WooCommerce. Remember how I mentioned a few editions ago, they’re creating a new base theme? Well, the team has decided a bit different. Work on the Purple Block Theme has concluded, and they’re exploring new approaches. Read through their strategy for WooCommerce block themes update.
- 📺 Rodolfo Melogli walks us through what you need to know about the upcoming WooCommerce 10.1 release.
🎁 Bonus
Back when I first started to share WordPress content somewhat regularly, I called it Remkus’ Ramblings. That name quickly didn’t cover the content, so that turned into Within WordPress.
Remkus’ Ramblings is too good of an alliteration to let go, so my personal newsletter continued in that name. I’ll send you irregular updates about articles I write, videos I publish, and whatever I produce.
So, if you’d like to hear me talk more about WordPress performance, tutorials, WordPress content, and occasionally the odd topic, do subscribe here.
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