My WCEU Recap, What WordPress Must do, and more 6.6 news!

Last week’s newsletter was full of WordPress 6.6 stuff, and this week’s edition will only double down on that. But, of course, there is more. I published my WordCamp Europe 2024 recap in which I look back at 10 editions of WCEU and answer some questions people wanted to have answered from my perspective as a co-founder.

Time to get with what 6.6 will bring to the table! Hope you enjoy it!

Get in front of 1600+ dedicated WordPress friends and check out my sponsoring options and reach out to me if you think we can be a good fit!

🗞️ Within WordPress News

Here’s what I saw happening this past week:

• Let’s start with which is probably the most important thing to catch up on when you’re building sites with WordPress. And that’s the WordPress 6.6 Field Guide. It lists all the enhancements, bug fixes, breaking changes, and other noteworthy highlights.
• The new localization system with improved performance which was introduced in 6.5 is seeing some enhancements in 6.6.

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• Carolina Nymark shared a whole bunch of updates she processed for FullSiteEditing.com which you must check out.

I mean, that site, and I have mentioned this before, is just a treasure trove full of information.

Seriously, if you’re building WordPress sites with the Site Editor, you need to bookmark this site, and praise Carolina. She’s making a very significant impact with that site!

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• Jamie Marsland, my friend and famous WordPress YouTuber published a very interesting video this week. It’s about how Wix approaches their expansion and what WordPress as a project can learn from it, copy from it. Spoiler alert: A LOT.

I don’t agree with the click-baity title, but very much so with the points Jamie raises.

Kevin Geary commented in a lengthy post on X on the video, and he too raises a lot of valid points regarding WordPress position, growth, and competitors. I think he overreaches on some of his conclusions, but he provide an interesting point of view to consider as well.

My disconnect with Kevin’s POV is mostly geared (pun actually not intended 😅!) towards WordPress being too difficult to work with. I’m sure it is for some crowds, and it does need a lot of the suggestions he raises to be integrated, but I don’t agree with that general stance as a statement.

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• Years ago I published a blog on how to Learn JavaScript Deeply as a reaction to Matt Mullenweg’s remark to do so for the future of WordPress. My Future of Team co-founder James Giroux referenced that in his article about how it’s time to learn enterprise, deeply.

Wonderful well-thought out article that raises a lot of interesting points to consider for anyone’s future in WordPress. And of course he referenced Scale Consortium as well in that post.

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• Rich Tabor’s shared his thoughts on Shaping WordPress: Style Variations, Speed Challenges & WordCamps

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• Ymir, the wonderful hosting solution from Carl Alexander (check out my podcast with him where he explains it in depth), published an interesting case study.

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• WooCommerce introduced their Woo Developer Newsletter. Looking forward to seeing what they’ll be sharing. I really love the “informing everyone better” mode the team at Woo entered lately.

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• WordPress Playground now allows you to clone a Git repo in the browser. Baller.

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🚀 Performance & Security

• Joe Hoyle shared a very interesting video tutorial on how to do WordPress Performance testing with Flamegraphs.
• Leveraging the Idle Until Urgent technique to improve performance.
• On the Make WordPress Hosting blog: The Image Revolution: AVIF and WebP

My favorite performance optimizing tools in WordPress:

• NitroPack: Cloud based performance optimizations
• Perfmatters: Clean up Scripts in WordPress
• WP Rocket: The best Front-end optimization plugin

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🔆 Within WordPress Highlight

Metorik released their Metorik Insights for WooCommerce. They analyzed billions of data points and hundreds of millions of orders to bring you the first Metorik Insights Report for WooCommerce. We uncovered a collection of astonishing insights that should help both store owners and folks in the WooCommerce community grow.

You’ll need to leave your email address to get it, but it’s worth it!

Some of my favorite WordPress tools:

• Gravity Forms: versatile and accessible form solution for WordPress
• Code Profiler for WordPress

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💡 Interesting Finds

• I’m sure you’ve all received that email from Google Analytics, so if you’re still not sure you want to move to GA4, here’s a very extensive list of analytics alternatives.

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🔎 Scanfully Updates

As you may have seen, we launched v1.0 last week! We published an update to what we’re doing with feedback and which two channels we’ve added for notifications.

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🎁 Bonus

🎙️ I’m running behind on publishing podcasts, but I’m catching up with releasing the conversation I had with Maciek Palmowski about Headless CMS and Static Sites and more!

More to come soon!

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That’s it for this week’s edition of Within WordPress. Thanks for reading!