This has probably been the most busy week of the year, yet. It’s one of those weeks where I was not Lord and Master of my calendar. But… of course that didn’t stop me from collecting lots of interesting things for this week’s edition of Inside WordPress.
(And thanks all for the nice positive feedback about the new format and logo!)
Hope you enjoy this edition!
Today’s edition of Inside WordPress is sponsored by NitroPack
It’s webinar time again! NitroPack’s is hosting their third webinar with Google and this time, the will focus on the hardest Core Web Vital – Largest Contentful Paint. Almost half of all websites aren’t passing this as well as they should, so you want to make sure you follow this one for actionable optimization strategies to boost your Core Web Vitals.
🗞️ Inside WordPress News
Here’s what I saw happening this past week:
- Yesterday,
all of the sudden there was a Live Preview button added to a plugin listing in the WordPress repo. Clicking on it launched a WordPress Playground instance with just that plugin active. Today, that was reverted. As it should’ve been.
This needs to be opt-in as there are too many options where having this makes zero sense. Personally, I think plugin developers should be able to control what they want to use for the demo of their product. Whether that’s an InstaWP link or their own thing.
- Patrick Posner released a new web tool, a service that turns your dynamic WordPress site into a static version. It’s called
Web to Zip .
I’ve already played with it and it’s a great way to move old stale WordPress site you’re running into static version. And upload them to Cloudflare Pages, for instance.
- Gabriel Rose, a Lead FE Engineer at 10up released very useful VS Code extension that
provides autocomplete for your WordPress theme.json tokens in your CSS . Nifty!
- Mark Wilkinson asked a great question on X. He asked
why the update in the use of Block Themes is extremely slow . And Derek Ashauer answered it perfectly. I think he’s absolutely spot on .
- How can you use the WordPress Search Block and have it search based only a specific post type? Check out Mark Wilkinson’s
excellent write-up as well as Georgi Mamadashvili’s answer .
- WebDevStudios introduced
wd_s version 4 . It’s a hybrid theme between a classic WordPress theme and a FSE theme.
🚀 Performance
It’s an older article from 3 years back, but still valid AF.
- Johnny Harris got one cool improvement into WordPress 6.4. If you are using persistent object caching,
WP_Query will now be loading the post objects from the object cache . The database loading from cache is faster than database and will take stress off the database server.
My favorite performance optimizing tools in WordPress:
The best Front-end optimization plugin Cleaning up WordPress + script manager Cloud based performance optimizations
🔆 Inside WordPress Highlight
- I mentioned
InstaWP above, and I think it’s such a cool service that it deserves to be highlighted. For instance, Altis Accelerate, a plugin you should play more with can be played with in an already configured and installed version, powered by InstaWP . How neat is that? But yeah, definitely check (both) out.
Some of my favorite WordPress tools:
- The
most versatile and accessible form solution for WordPress - LocalWP, the
easiest to use local dev solution
💡 Interesting Finds
- If you’re a ChatGPT Plus member, you can now use Dall-E 3 right there in ChatGPT. If you’re curious what you can do with that, just
check out this thread . - Silvan, again, shared something you all need to see. It’s something created by Stefan Velthuys called
Charcopy . An easy way to get your special characters like ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
📖 What I am reading
I know I promised Cloudflare bits, but I couldn’t quite finish it in time. Something “about what’s in a barrel won’t turn sour” 😅. You’ll just have to wait a bit longer.
🎁 Bonus
My 🎙️
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