It’s been a busy week, hasn’t it? This week started out slow with only the first item after the bump and I kinda was worried it’d be an extreme light week, but we bounced back big!
So… lots to talk about. Hope you enjoy it!
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🗞️ Within WordPress News
Here’s what I saw happening this past week:
We saw some noise on the Twitters this past week starting with Ari’s post on X about the perceived high entry-level we currently have for anyone wanting to contribute to the Gutenberg project. And with that, ultimately, WordPress Core.
Now, I’m not usually one to discuss #wpdrama, but I’ll make an exception here for this one. Why? Well, I would have liked to see everyone listening with the intent to listen, not to reply so that we get to actual solutions. My buddy James Giroux published a recap blog post of what happened on his blog and it covers everything really well.
Go ahead and read up and make yourself be heard on the various posts on X or on James’ blog. We need to make this discussion more prominent!
Slightly related, Erik Karkovack‘s blog post is a great read as well.
- On repeat: WP Includes is running a survey that “aims to gain critical insights into the gender composition of leadership teams, the experiences of women and gender-diverse leaders and employees, and the challenges and barriers to their career success”.
- Quarterly reminder of all the good that Carolina Nymark shares with her Full Site Editing site. I mean, that site, and I have mentioned this before, is just a treasure trove full of goodies. Seriously good.
- Brian Coords shared his wishlist for WordPress 6.6.
I was going to give you my hot take, but really, I want what he wants. And more, but yeah, let’s start with this.
- Johnathon Williams released a fun plugin for all you who create Loom videos for clients. It brings them inside their WordPress Dashboards.
- Ryan Welcher updated his wonderful Advanced Query Loop plugin. It adds the ability to manually create a list of posts.
This is one of my staple plugins since building FSE themes.
- For those of us building multilingual sites, we’re kinda limited with really good options (WeGlot, Polylang Pro, MulitlingualPress (MLP) to list my favorites), but MLP is my favorite as it relies on WordPress being in multisite mode. And that just scales better and handles separation of concerns infinitely better. Well, there’s another plugin out there called Multisite Language Switcher that uses multisite as well.
Go and check it out, it’s pretty solid.
- My favorite local development tool for WordPress has seen a serious new contender arrive at the scene. It’s called Studio and it’s built by Automattic. It’s based on WordPress Playground and it’s fast, snappy, and looks gorgeous.
I’m not sure it’ll make me move from LocalWP just yet as I miss quite a few developer oriented features, but it looks and works absolutely brilliantly.
- Speaking of WordPress Playground, did you know you can build interactive demos with it?
- Tom McFarlin published his third and final article dedicated to Anonymous functions in WordPress. This one is about how to deregister anonymous functions, but do read the other two linked in the article as well!
- Looks we’re finally seeing the option to duplicate a post as part of WordPress Core. I say finally because Aurooba has suggested this before and I don’t understand why it didn’t go in that time around.
I just hope they extend this functionality to pretty much everything we have inside the Block Editor and Site Editor wherever that makes sense.
- Mike Hindle wrote about his experiences building a theme in the Site Editor. The pros and cons
Speaking of building with FSE, The Create Block Theme plugin saw an update that Anne McCarthy covered excellently on the Gutenberg Times blog.
- David F. Carr wrote about transforming a single WordPress Block into a Block Variation with InnerBlocks.
- Listen, did you know that Gravity SMTP supports custom SMTP and API-based services and allows for easy toggling between connected email services to select the most suitable provider? Well, now you do.
- While you’re waiting for that .1 release whenever WordPress releases a major, make sure you’re still running the most secure version of WordPress.
- Is it reasonably to replace your fleet of EC2 instances with something in my home office to host WordPress? That’s exactly what Eric Mann asked himself.
🚀 Performance & Security
- Vladimir Smitka published an article highlighting over a dozen security tips for WordPress that is NOT your default bullshit list. Pretty much all make sense to invest time into to harden your WordPress site.
- A very interesting discussion about cache invalidation issues when caching user-specific data, solutions like using different URLs, partial caching, edge functions, and drawbacks like flash of unstyled content.
My favorite performance optimizing tools in WordPress:
- The best Front-end optimization plugin
- Cleaning up WordPress + script manager
- Cloud based performance optimizations
🔆 Within WordPress Highlight
Gravity SMTP, by Gravity Forms, is finally here to make sure your WordPress site’s emails actually get where they need to go! Whether it’s password resets, new user sign-ups, or form notifications, it connects with reliable email services to boost delivery rates.
This means less worrying about missed communications and more happy users engaging with your site. Exciting, right?
Some of my favorite WordPress tools:
- The most versatile and accessible form solution for WordPress
- LocalWP, the easiest to use local dev solution
💡 Interesting Finds
- Ghost introduced ActivityPub to its core going forward. Something I hope we’ll see happening at WordPress Core at some point as well. As a replacement for Pings. Tell me that doesn’t make sense!
🎁 Bonus
I’m very much into optimizing for health, for longevity, if you didn’t know. Today’s bonus is in that field. Farbood shared a longevity assistant called Sequel. It’s open-source and it’s pretty cool! It is locally stored: they don’t get or see your data, but allows you to chat with your complete health picture: blood labs, Whoop, DEXA, MRI, therapies, drugs or supplements you’re on with a local LLM. Or OpenAI, if you prefer.
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