I’m mostly wondering after this week how anyone who regularly works in 30ºC/86F rooms can be productive at all. My A/C was not doing what it was doing, so to see this was a stressful week is an understatement 😅.
That said, I managed to collect a lot of interesting finds and some WordPress tools you’re going to like. Oh, and I worked on the landing page for the first course with the help of some really wonderful friends. More on that next week.
Hope you enjoy it!
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🗞️ Within WordPress News
Here’s what I saw happening this past week:
- You’ve all seen him get mentioned here regularly, but Felix Arntz hit a major milestone this week—10 years of contributing to WordPress Core. He’s been contributing ever since, and it changed his life in so many ways. He wrote down
his 10 valuable lessons learned , which will hopefully help other current and future contributors.
- Peter Wilson has crafted a
unit test suite to validate WordPress plugin headers. It ensures required headers are present, forbidden ones are absent, and that shared values like version numbers and licenses match between the plugin file and readme.txt. A practical tool for plugin developers aiming for consistency and compliance.
- My friend Jono is on a roll! If he’s not publishing
insightful articles on his blog, it’s a new plugin release! Very niche, but also very handy when you need it. Well-Knows File Manager .
- OMGF Pro v4.1 by Daan van den Bergh introduces
Smart Preload , a feature that automatically detects and preloads above-the-fold fonts to enhance performance. This automation aims to improve metrics like LCP and CLS without manual configuration.
- I like it when solutions built op top of WordPress put a real effort into being as native as possible. Case in point, Stackable blocks
now have theme.json support . They now inherit the styles of your Block Theme, and blend with your block theme right away.
That’s how you build. Great move, Benjamin Intal!
- GravityKit has launched
Potomatic , an AI-powered CLI tool that translates .potfiles into any OpenAI-supported language. It offers features like smart batching, cost control, custom dictionaries, and A/B testing for prompt optimization. Pretty cool!
Maybe this will help me finally translate the latest version of WordPress in Frisian again. Big job if you’re the only one contributing on a locale 😓
- Next week, WooCommerce 10.0 will introduce shareable checkout URLs, but how do they really work? Rémi Corson
broke it all down on how to use this lovely new feature .
Karol K built Hoverly. Now what does that do, you might think? Well, as links on most WordPress sites are kinda boring, usually just underlines or a hover color, he set out to fix that. With modern CSS, you can do way more: Hoverly .
- TWIL about RepoMan. And no… it’s not about that.
RepoMan by Jesse Nickles allows users to search and install free open-source WordPress plugins directly from GitHub!
- Survey time! ACF would love to learn how you’re using ACF’s powerful fields and features. Take the
2025 ACF Annual Survey and contribute to the insights shaping WordPress development.
- WooCommerce is building their next-generation block theme, designed for a fast, modern, and fully block-based store experience.
Learn what it took to build it and how you can test it.
Fun fact. More than a decade ago, Adii and Magnus from WooThemes at the time, asked me to a comparison between Canvas (the current default WooCommerce theme) and the Genesis Framework. Good to see Woo building a new one from scratch, is what I’m saying.
- Last one in this section is another WooCommerce related article. I think the title speaks for itself:
A Year of Accessibility Improvements in WooCommerce Core .
🔆 Within WordPress Highlight
This week we saw Content Independence Day at Cloudflare. They are, along with a majority of the world’s leading publishers and AI companies, changing the default to block AI crawlers unless they pay creators for their content.
Now, perhaps this is not a strictly a WordPress highlight, I do find this initiative extremely relevant for anyone having a WordPress site. Read more about
💡 Interesting Finds
- Saron Yitbarek demonstrates how to create
scroll-driven animations using just CSS , eliminating the need for JavaScript. By leveraging the animation-timelineproperty withscroll()orview(), developers can tie animations directly to user scroll behavior. This feature is now supported in Safari 26 beta, making it easier to implement smooth, responsive animations. A must-read for modern front-end developers.
- Cloudflare has launched something super neat. It’s called
Sandboxes , Sandboxes allow you to safely run arbitrary code on Cloudflare Containers. You can build a PR review bot that can safely checkout a git repo, install all the dependencies, and run tests.
- Aykut Saraç built
JSON Crack , a slick open-source tool that turns messy JSON into clean, interactive visual graphs. It supports formats like YAML, XML, and CSV too, and runs fully client-side for privacy. Great for devs who need clarity fast.
Suuuper nice and clean way to see JSONs.
- To all my fellow podcasters, my mates Nathan Wrigley and Dan Maby are building something new you might be interested in. It’s called Podcaster Plus Blocks, the game-changing WordPress plugin designed by podcasters for podcasters. Stop wrestling with generic players and clunky workflows. It’s time to make your podcast website as impressive as your audio.
And you can test their beta !
- This is a fantastic, visually stunning,
free introductory book on deep learning . Highly recommended for curious people who want the lay of the land.
That’s it for this week’s edition of Within WordPress. Thanks for reading!
Best, Remkus
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