It really feels like we’re ramping up big time with AI in these past couple of weeks. With MCP functionality entering both WordPress and WooCommerce, we’re going to see so many new use cases of what we can build with and on top of WordPress. I’m very excited about what the future brings.
This newsletter covers several of these AI-powered things. Hope you enjoy it!
Within WordPress is sponsored by BrowserStack:
Running a WordPress site means staying on top of performance, accessibility, and responsiveness. But across hundreds or thousands of pages, broken links, slow loads, and visual bugs are easy to miss.
That’s where tools like
🗞️ Within WordPress News
Here’s what I saw happening this past week:
- Can it run Doom. Jonathan Bossenger believes it had to be done to see if WordPress can run it.
Well… it can. And so can you .
- Nick Hamze has been on a roll these past weeks, as you may have seen in my previous newsletter. This week, he’s got a fix for creating a
better Readme for your wp.org plugin .
- In the past weeks, you have seen me mention Mike McAlister from OllieWP launching their
Ollie Menu Designer . A incredibly smart plugin that allows us to create mega menus for FSE themes. And it’s now available on the repo as a plugin. There’s even talk about finding a way to merge it into core 😍.
- Shopify is going after WordPress e-commerce. They
published a plugin that allows you to run a Shopify powered store right inside your WordPress site.
Very curious to see what’s going to come of this.
- Tammie Lister launched a super fun project called Blocktober. And as the name kinda gives away, it’s about fun blocks she creates with
Telex in October. She’s already published quite a few, so go check them out for inspiration.
This
- Rolling back to a previous version of WordPress is a bit of hassle, isn’t it? Well, there are plugins like
Super Rollback that make that a lot less of a hassle. Curious what it does? Check out Sufia Banu‘s review on it . It’s a good one.
- Here’s another plugin I’d like to highlight. It’s called
My Admin Bookmarks , and it’s perfect for people who often need to edit the same pages.
Thank you, Mirko, for sharing this one!
- rtCamp shared
a great tutorial on how to migrate your media to a Digital Asset Management (DAM) system . It is a smart step toward improving performance, scalability, and long-term maintainability, and it’s a great tool to have in your belt.
- Here’s another interesting plugin that enhances the Block Editor. It introduces a collection of rich text formats for the WordPress block editor with interactive elements. The name will either stick with you, or it won’t , but don’t let that stop you from trying
BlaBlaBlocks Formats 😅
- Dennis Ploetner shared
his thoughts on the WordPress Network Admin Redesign.
- You know how we say in WordPress “there’s a plugin for that”? Well, to counter that, read this thread on Reddit called “
You don’t need a plugin for that “.
🤖 WordPress & AI
- I
nteresting article on WooCommerce’s AI plans . WooCommerce 10.3 will also introduce the Model Context Protocol (MCP), allowing AI to communicate directly with stores. Alongside that, the new Abilities API is designed to let plugins expose their functionality to AI systems. The overall goal is for AI agents to be able to discover WooCommerce products and complete purchases off-site.
This may seem like a challenge: fewer visitors browsing sites to shop. But I think when plugins can render their features AI-friendly, this change introduces a significant opportunity.
🚀 Performance & Security
- One of the best features Redis has, besides the caching part, is their queue system. Per Søderlind shared a
great integration with it and WordPress’ cron for a better cron experience. Very neat.
💡 Interesting Finds
- Mike Bal put in close to 1000 hours into vibe coding over the last two years, and he broke out some of the lessons that changed the way he approaches it, the tools he uses, etc. If you are still just dipping your toes in,
this is for you .
🛒 WooCommerce News
- During the Stripe Tour NYC event last week, Stripe unveiled its future vision for agentic commerce,
revealing a partnership with Woo to bring this innovation to their merchants.
Exciting developments are on the way!
- Over the past year, WooCommerce has concentrated on boosting overall performance, delivering faster load times, refining testing workflows, and deepening collaboration across the contributor community. And that’s good. What’s even better is that
they’re going down this road even harder .
We really need Woo to go all in on this, because the tired old claim that “WooCommerce doesn’t scale” (it does, but it’s not as easy as it could be) keeps getting recycled, mostly by people running it on underpowered, poorly configured hosting. It absolutely does scale. Ask me how I know.
- WooCommerce released a developer notice: To ensure consistent behavior,
wc_format_decimal will now return an empty string . Plugin developers should review and update any usage of this function ahead of the WooCommerce 10.4 release.
That’s it for this week’s edition of Within WordPress. Thanks for reading!
Best, Remkus
Leave a Reply