This was a big week. We finally launched
That, and tons of WordPress-related news, of course. Let’s jump in; I hope you enjoy it!
🗞️ Within WordPress News
Here’s what I saw happening:
- We have a .org developer round up again. Justin Tadlock’s
October developer roundup gives you a testing list before WordPress 7.2 Beta 1 on October 20. My favorite part of this resource is the Roadmap to 7.2 outlined now .
CMS Conf’s agenda is live for November 12–14 in Gdynia, Poland. There’s plenty to compare, including Mike Miler’s visual regression testing workshop, Anne-Mieke Bovelett on accessible CMS interfaces, and Milana Cap on WordPress’s HTML API.
Also: they have this nice coupon for 40% off: CMSCONF40
- Brian Coords
proposes bringing MCP setup into Settings → Connectors so site owners can find the adapter, endpoint, and client configuration in one place. The experimental prototype shows the setup flow; this is proposed Core work, with the MCP server still supplied by the optional adapter plugin.
- WordPress’s
toolbar-link proposal would make the W open Dashboard and the site name open the front end consistently, including both editors. Feedback is open until October 16, before a Core patch is written.
- Barry Kooij
reports 52% more author-chosen matches among the first three recommendations in his completely rebuilt Related Posts for WordPress plugin, version 3.0. He tested on 30 posts from one blog against version 2. The release notes explain the local matching and upgrade: WordPress 6.8/PHP 8.0+ are required.
Still the best plugin out there to do related posts under a blog post in WordPress, IMO.
- Andy Peatling’s
October benchmark produced no WordPress sites in nearly 300 runs with seven agents, given requests that didn’t name a platform. The recommendations explore portable site bundles and imports any host could support; Brian Coords weighs the cost of simplifying WordPress . And Ross Morsali asks whether comparison articles could improve WordPress’s chances .
It made me write part I of what I think is needed:
- 🎉 Jonathan Bossenger is restarting
Feature Notifications , a shared notification system with a hub in the admin bar inside of WordPress. The December 1 target is a working 0.3.0 feature-plugin preview that can save and dismiss notices; the post identifies unfinished code and where contributors can help.
Can we pplleeaassee finally have an improved version of this in Core? Asking for all my friends.
- Danny van Kooten
announces that recognized test sites no longer use Koko Analytics Pro license slots . The hostname rules distinguish example.stagingfromstaging.example.com—the public subdomain still counts. Small wins are still wins!
- This project keeps getting better:
WordPress.com’s OpenStation walkthrough shows how to drag media into a draft and keep a preview alongside it, refreshed on save. Saved window layouts follow you between computers; the phone layout is still experimental.
- The AI team’s
September 2 meeting summary describes storing embeddings, the vectors used to find similar content, in WordPress through the AI plugin, rather than new Core tables.
- This one is from a few years back, but some recent discussions on X made me revisit it. Greyd’s Mark Weisbrod
argues that agencies should weigh ongoing support and updates when choosing tools to build a business on. As lifetime pricing doesn’t remove the cost of maintaining software.
- Austin Ginder’s
rebuilding prompt asks an agent to recreate a website in local WordPress with Cove , then check the editor and front end.
- Now’s a good moment to start preparing for Black Friday. Start with having
Omnisend be the reliable platform you can depend on for WooCommerce-related email. And, make an average of $79* for every $1 you spend.
🚀 Performance & Security
- Jono Alderson
updated Edge Images with optional local copies of transformed variants , which can reduce recurring Cloudflare transformation charges. Local copies are off by default and use extra disk space; social, schema, and sitemap images stay at the edge. Version 6.0 is a breaking rebuild: check the removed integrations before upgrading, and keep a supported image transformation provider configured.
Love, love, love, this little helper plugin. Thanks for this update, Jono!
- A normal-looking homepage doesn’t tell you whether a site is clean. In
Melapress’s recorded security panel , Thomas Raef describes fake Cloudflare checks shown only to selected visitors, plus attackers changing a scanner’s allowlist to conceal infected files.
- WordPress 7.2 will
turn off NO_BACKSLASH_ESCAPESfor its database sessionto avoid misreading values escaped with backslashes. Server global settings stay untouched. Overrides belong in a db.phpdrop-in, but Core may not work correctly with that mode enabled.
Some of my favorite WordPress tools:
- My two favorite forms for WordPress:
Gravity Forms and WS Form - These are the themes I use:
Ollie , Rockbase and GeneratePress - And, obviously,
Scanfully for all my Site Health & Performance monitoring
🔆 Within WordPress Highlight
Fewer rounds of “which page, which browser?”
💡 Interesting Finds
- Gabe Fletcher
reports replacing $3,000/month in Semrush and Ahrefs subscriptions with $30 in DataForSEO API calls using OpenSEO . The follow-up describes a month of side-by-side checks for local-service businesses; the $30 is API spend, without a documented total running cost.
- Taylor Otwell reports clearer text on an XDR display after changing
a macOS font-smoothing setting , credited to Adam Wathan. The post includes the command and logout/login step.
- akari’s
Grok team prompt makes the completion test explicit: define the deliverable, limit what the agent may change, and require evidence before declaring the job finished. The image’s creator attribution is unverified.
- For code explanations, Matt Pocock recommends
/show-me: call trees, diffs, Mermaid diagrams, or a focused HTML view. The skill instructions give your agent concrete formats to choose from.
- For the Omarchy users: NetworkChuck’s
50-tip tour starts with moving windows and switching workspaces from the keyboard, then gets into the tools already tucked into the desktop.
- Jason Cohen has turned the A Smart Bear business frameworks into
agent skills . The skills guide you through questions about customers, positioning, pricing, and strategy, then save the result.
- Brian Casel
splits each product’s AI team into Head, Growth, and Maintainer bots : roadmap and coordination, growth experiments, and recurring chores.
- The
Grok Bot guides include a template walkthrough for sharing instructions, memories, and integrations. Custom scripts and MCP servers need separate setups; check the packaged details before sharing or installing a template.
- NASA’s
Worldview lets you explore satellite imagery, compare dates, and layer observations of fires, air quality, and other conditions.
🛒 WooCommerce News
Purple is now available from WordPress.org and the WooCommerce Marketplace as a free block theme. Browse the storefront demo before trying it on staging; version 1.0.3 requires WordPress 7.1+, WooCommerce 11.1+, and PHP 7.4+.
- Katie Keith
breaks down why WooCommerce and Shopify market-share figures disagree . Shopify leads in HTTP Archive’s busiest-site bands, while WooCommerce leads across its broader crawl; detected websites aren’t the same as active stores or revenue.
🔎 Scanfully Updates
We did a big one. It’s finally here: Scanfully 2.0. A completely reimagined and redesigned Dashboard with tons of improvements left and right.
The most significant changes to existing features are
And… we have new stuff! We now have an
But there’s even more! We now have a
That’s it for this week’s edition of Within WordPress. Thanks for reading!
Best, Remkus
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