Things are winding down in the WordPress realm as we’re getting ready for the shortest day of the year tomorrow.
That said, this potentially last edition of Within WordPress newsletter for this year is full of news about WordPress, WooCommerce, and WordPress tools.
Hope you enjoy it!
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🗞️ Within WordPress News
Here’s what I saw happening this past week:
- The most interesting thing in the State of the Word to me was Matías’ demo and the progress updates for WordPress Playground and Data Liberation. Rae over at The Repository wrote a great recap.
The rest of State of the Word was kinda meh, if I’m being really honest 🤷🏼♂️.
- Cloudflare does a radar post, a year in review, every year, and they’ve published theirs for this year. In it, they share that WordPress is powering 53% of top websites. That’s an insane amount of websites.
Their whole review is interesting, btw. Mind-boggling numbers about various “internet stats”. Like, how internet traffic has grown 17.2%.
- Steve Jones shared how to vet plugins for accessibility issues in a blog post he shared last week.
- What’s new in Gutenberg for version 19.9 is worth checking out as this release also includes a great improvement for Classic Themes.
- Mastering light and dark mode styling in block themes. Who doesn’t want to know how to do that? Justin Tadlock wrote a wonderful explainer on the topic over on the WordPress Developer blog.
- If you want to learn about local development strategies, Kaspars Dambis is developing an online video course that will help you understand the internal workings and best practices of reliable development environments. Learn more here.
- One of the cool things that Matías was showing in his State of the Word demo was the use of the Block Binding API. Eric Karkovack wrote a great tutorial for that API over on Kinsta’s blog.
- A Within WordPress newsletter in December without mentioning one of the plugins Robert DeVore released in the past week would not be a complete newsletter, now, would it? The one that caught my attention is the HPOS Compatibility Scanner for WooCommerce.
- Speaking of things catching my attention, Nathan published a small WordPress Plugin which provides a block for the Block Editor for announcements. The announcement can be set to automatically expire at a certain date. Cool beans.
🛒 Within WooCommerce News
- WooCommerce has published a massive document that documents every WooCommerce hook and how it works with Cart/Checkout and Store API, as well as alternatives. Their goal is to verify 100% of hooks and have alternatives.
Can we have more resources like this? Absolutely lovely!
- Big changes ahead for WooCommerce payment gateways! Woo is introducing a new React-based settings interface and standardized integration patterns in WC 9.6. Anyone developing any kind of extension, start preparing your integrations for testing.
🚀 Performance & Security
- David Allsop shared a great tutorial on how to leverage Query Monitor to profile running time and memory usage of WordPress code.
- The UK will introduce a Cyber Security and Resilience Bill in 2025. Basically, a UK version of the EU Cyber Resilience Act, which was implemented last October. If you’ve got no clue what that about, Tim Nash has written an in-depth article covering what’s affected.
- Edouard, researcher at Patchstack shared fascinating insights about the most exploited WordPress threats in Q4 of 2024. He also provides in-depth examples of how virtual patches work to protect against vulnerabilities.
- Ivailo Hristov, formerly CTO of NitroPack, now CTO at Uxify published a good article on measuring INP on All Browsers and Devices
🔆 Within WordPress Highlight
The ”What’s New for Developers?”, December 2024 edition on the WordPress Developer blog provides a summary of developer-related changes in the last month, including updates to the Gutenberg project, WordPress Core, and other areas.
💡 Interesting Finds
- The State of JavaScript was published. Earlier this year, The State of CSS was published, btw. Also a great read.
- Boost accessibility and user experience by mastering decorative images. Learn best practices for empty alt attributes and inclusive design.
🎁 Bonus
🎙️ There’s been a lot of noise about WooCommerce’s “More in Core” initiative, so I invited James Kemp, Core Product Manager at Woo, to my podcast to talk what’s what.
We had a great conversation and James provided a lot of clarity of what will happen with WooCommerce in 2025.
As mentioned in the intro, this is most likely the last edition of 2024, but who knows… if we end up with a lot of news over the next two weeks, I might send out one more.
That’s it for this week’s edition of Within WordPress. Thanks for reading!
Wishing you happy holidays,
Remkus
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