No newsletter last week, huh? Yes, that happened. Well, sometimes in life
Let’s jump straight in, shall we?
🗞️ Within WordPress News
Here’s what I saw happening this past two weeks:
- WordPress progresses slowly, but WordPress 6.7.2-
RC1 has been released , and will see a full release next week. For me, this is the point release I’ve waited for in order to feel fully confident to upgrade from 6.6 to the 6.7 branch for a few high impact clients.
- Speaking of releases, WordPress 6.8 is shaping up to become a very solid release based
on the published roadmap .
Quite happy to see good effort put into making the editor faster, as well as introducing Speculative Loading to Core WordPress. What is your favorite 6.8 feature {{ subscriber.first_name | strip | default: “” }}?
- Gravatar just published
their 2025 developer roadmap , and I gotta say, it’s nice to see this simple service become so much better. Without compromising on privacy or adding complexity.
I particularly love how they’re looking at the future with Fediverse integrations and such.
- As mentioned in a previous newsletter,
PressConf is shaping up to be not only an epic event, but the format and different way of doing a WordPress related event like this is quite refreshing. A most excellent list of speakers are already presented.
Seriously consider going if you haven’t decided yet.
- Woo introduced their
new branding for WooCommerce . A new logo, new website, new everything, I guess. From their website, “We wanted to rebuild the brand from the ground up to better resonate with our audiences, represent our product, and compete in the market.”
I’m a fan. I love the logo, I love the freshness of the new site and positioning. Not only that, but I think it’s exactly what WooCommerce needs, and
- 📺 Did you know you can connect your WordPress site to Canva? No more manually copying text from your WordPress blog to Canva,
just import it . Kinda cool to have a way to do this. Built by DataPocket.
- Patrick Posner, the man behind Simply Static released
Simply Static Studio , and I have to say, it’s a very interesting move. Optimizing the whole process from turning a dynamic version of WordPress into a static hosted version, adding hosting to the mix as well.
Very curious to see how this goes!
- Dogfooding. I’m a huge fan of this. We do it with
Scanfully as well. I like how Alex Standiford came to the realization of how he was spending way too much time trying to build separate sales pipelines. You know, when the answer was right in front of him with his own product Siren. And you guessed it, he is now building his business around Siren .
- WordPress VIP have
released three courses for enterprise-level WordPress developers. They are Advanced WordPress Debugging, Enterprise WordPress Security, and Enterprise WordPress Performance.
I hiiighly recommend you check them out if developing on top of WordPress is your thing. Don’t let the “for enterprise-level” thing scare you off.
- Do you sell online? Then you need
Omnisend . Earn $73 for every $1 spent, doing basically nothing. Email and SMS marketing so effective, it’s almost boring.
- Not only does
Robert DeVore publish wonderful plugins , he also writes a mean blog post every now and then. Check out his blog post about “ How a Security Audit Can Save Your E-Commerce Store from Disaster “.
- Maybe you’ve heard of this new AI based code editor called
Cursor ? I had it installed on my machine for a couple of weeks, but didn’t get to actually build something with it yet. Not properly. That changed when I took it serious and learned how to prompt properly. I talk about it in my blog post “ How To Get The Most Out of Cursor for WordPress Code “.
Somewhat related, Brian Coords also talked about the topic of “using AI to build something for WordPress”. Specifically,
- WooCommerce is doing a big refresh of the WooCommerce email customization settings page in WooCommerce 9.7 (behind a feature flag).
They would love to get feedback on the changes !
- Hendrik Luehrsen, over at KrautPress, thinks
WordPress Themes are in a crisis ? Great article and thought-piece.
All in all, I agree with some of his points, but not the general conclusion. Things are shifting for sure, but “crisis”… I dunno. Themes are in a transitional phase for sure! Do
- This week I was reminded that Yoast has a
WP CLI tool to generate fake data in bulk . Bulk bulk.
Somewhat related, I guess: Daan van den Bergh created a WordPress plugin that allows you to
- Rich Tabor shared
a very fun experiment building a text editor for WordPress.
I would love to see WordPress end up with the concept of revisions Rich presents in his experiment, NGL.
QuickLink Pro is a little plugin created by Johnathon Williams that adds external links to the standard link dialog in the block editor. No more copying and pasting common links. Super nice!
- Nick Diego wrote about how you can
stop struggling with cumbersome theme.json files .
- It appears Matt Medeiros is easily scared 😅. He published an interesting video titled “
I built an app with AI, now I’m scared for WordPress… “. All kidding aside, it’s a great video that gives us a lot to think about.
🚀 Performance & Security
- Meet Baseline,
Baseline shows which web platform features are browser-compatible and ready to use in your projects today, helping you make informed decisions about features and libraries. - How QuintoAndar
reduced INP by 80% , increasing conversions by 36% What’s new in DevTools, Chrome 132 Debugging speculative navigations for faster page loads
🔆 Within WordPress Highlight
I’m very happy to be able to share some exciting news: LoopConf is coming back! It’s been 10 years since the first
I don’t have many details to share just yet, but rest assured you’ll hear them first as soon as they’re available. In case you’re new to LoopConf, it’s known for hosting some of the most interesting developer-focused presentations in the WordPress space. I can’t wait to see what they have in store this time around!
💡 Interesting Finds
- If you wanted to, you could build your own transactional email service. Did you know that? Because with
Plunk you can. - Basecamp increased their Basecamp trial → to paid conversion by 30%, and they don’t know how. Or
even want to know how . Wild. - Proposal for the
CSS if() function 👀
🔎 Scanfully Updates
One of the key components of Scanfully is its WordPress Activity Log. A hosted version of that. We wrote about
That’s it for this week’s edition of Within WordPress. Thanks for reading!
Leave a Reply