Happy Friday to you! Although, I should probably say Happy Friday/Saturday/Sunday/Monday, as not all of you read this newsletter immediately 🙃.
This 145th episode is filled with plenty of interesting tidbits and insights! First, though, I’m proud to announce I’ll be speaking at PressConf this April in Arizona. The entire event is going to be something we’ve never seen before, though building slightly off of PressNomics. I highly recommend you to consider going!
But anyway, let’s dive in what this week brought us, shall we?
🗞️ Within WordPress News
Here’s what I saw happening this past week:
- Chris Hinds from Equalize Digital shared what they learned in 2024 from all the WordPress sites they audited, custom hosting and data analytics dashboards, and some of the largest plugins. These are the top accessibility issues they found.
While we’re on the topic of accessibility, get a better idea of where the accessible name of elements comes from, why you sometimes want to change it, and how to do that properly.
- Learn all about Performance and Security for WordPress in my webinar I do together with my friends from InstaWP. Your website can’t live without these two, but what do you actually need there? This and more will be covered on the 27th of February, and you can already subscribe.
- Jeff Star from Perishable Press released version 1.4 from his 8G Firewall. If you didn’t know, it offers lightweight, server-level protection against a wide range of malicious requests, bad bots, automated attacks, spam, and many other types of threats and nonsense.
- You know I love WP CLI, right? So, naturally, I get excited when other folks share great solutions built on top of WP CLI. Especially cool ones where you pull in WordPress from your production server to your local dev environment with a simple command.
Do check out other people’s suggestions in the comments on X as well.
- Remember when I highlighted the State of Enterprise WordPress survey a while back? Well, we now have a State of Enterprise WordPress report! Fun statistic: 18% serve over 10 million visitors per month.
Related: Human Made‘s CGO Noel Tock is talking “WordPress in 2025″ and why it should be on your 5-year roadmap.
- Within WordPress is all about WordPress and its tools. From plugins, dev tools, to solutions bridged to it. One of the greatest (and coolest!) marketing related tools is Omnisend. And they’re doing a webinar. In just 90 minutes, they’ll break down all of 2024’s key takeaways and provide standout tactics to dominate 2025.
- LocalWP updated to version 9.2.0 and what’s cool about this release is that this version fully runs Apple Silicon natively on macOS. PHP, nginx, MySQL 8.0.35+, rsync, ssh, Apache, Mailpit, and authentication applets all use Apple Silicon or Universal binaries.
And it’s noticeably faster! And we all want things fast, right? Right?!
- On the topic of local dev tools, the Studio app from WordPress.com continues its slow march to becoming a full-featured local development app (and with that a LocalWP competitor).
- WooCommerce 9.7 will introduce a modernized Payments interface, enhanced shipping displays, and major performance improvements for the block editor. Discover what’s coming in the 9.7 release.
- Progress Planner Pro was launched this week to give everyone a little nudge to tackle the essential, though sometimes tedious, work on their website.
- WordPress agency Filter released a very informative white paper together with Barn2. It’s called The Marketer’s Guide to WooCommerce, and it is jam packed with expert tips and insights.
- Brian Gardner shared how Gutenberg 20.1 will bring Full Site Editing inside the block editor. With 20.1, pages display the header and footer, making the experience more WYSIWYG than ever 📺.
🚀 Performance & Security
- The folks over at Melapress published on Bob’s Do The Woo site about WooCommerce Security Tips: Lessons from Melapress’s annual security survey.
- CSS attr() gets an upgrade
- 2025 Web Performance Trends: Insights from the Experts by Ana Boneva. An excellent 8-min read.
🔆 Within WordPress Highlight
One of my favorite Block Theme solutions, it’s actually way more than that, just updated with one of my favorite kinds of updates. Greyd Suite added a bunch of performance optimizations in their latest update.
I say solutions and not “theme” because it does way more than just being a theme. You should check out what their solution does!
💡 Interesting Finds
- This one’s for all you hackerz out there: Track personal Bluetooth devices via Apple’s “Find My” network using OpenHaystack and Macless-Haystack with tools written in Go/TinyGo
- Great find on some great things you might not know about CSS Custom Counter Styles from CSS Tricks.
🎁 Bonus
🎙️ In an insightful episode of my Within WordPress podcast, I welcomed the illustrious Nathan Wrigley from WPBuilds, a very well-recognized figure in the WordPress podcasting world. Nathan shares his passion for the WordPress ecosystem.
We learn how he got sucked in the world of WordPress, but we talk a great deal about his evolution of his podcasting career, gear preferences, and the challenges and triumphs of creating engaging content.
We also touch a bit on the future of WordPress and pioneering projects like Playground. Whether you’re a WordPress enthusiast or a budding podcaster, Nathan’s journey offers a treasure trove of valuable insights.
Go and listen, and you’ll understand why I shared $this on X, or on BlueSky.
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