There it is, number 150. This basically means I’ve done a weekly WordPress newsletter for about 3 years (it’s been longer because I took long breaks 😅).
To celebrate this milestone, I’ve moved over everything Within WordPress to a separate domain, as well as introduced a new branding and logo. Read all about it here on my blog.
That’s a lot to take in already, I know, but there’s even more! This week is packed with news and fascinating insights. Hope you enjoy it!
🗞️ Within WordPress News
Here’s what I saw happening this past week:
- 📺 Can AI find and fix security vulnerabilities in a WordPress plugin without breaking functionality? My good friend Jonathan Bossenger went in full research mode and this is what he learned!
Do check out the podcast I did with Jonathan as well!
- What would a bridge between Tailwind CSS and WordPress be called? That’s right, that’d be called WindPress. And it exists! It’s a plugin that allows you to use Tailwind CSS in WordPress without the need for a development environment that supports modern JavaScript build tools.
- WordPress 6.8 is upon us, with the first beta released. Learn all about the release schedule (some even call it a release party 🤷🏼) and who is involved in the upcoming 6.8 milestone.
Here’s an interesting change regarding Child Themes you’ll want to check out.
- Linnea Huxford built an AI-powered alt text generation tool called AI SEO Tools. It’s a HUGE opportunity to give your site an SEO boost. Works perfectly right in your WordPress’s Media Library. It’s not perfect yet, but she’s actively working on it.
When using this, remember that AI (still) needs a human review.
- Switch to better email & SMS marketing with Omnisend. Get the top-rated email marketing platform to convert & keep more customers. Get started today!
- Stumbled upon a WooCommerce MCP server proof of concept by James LePage. It allows you to use natural language to request data. Meaning, you’d no longer be dependent on knowing how to use WP_Query to find what you’re looking for.
- This is community. Joost de Valk, famous for Yoast SEO but now from Progress Planner, sent a bug reports to The Events Calendar team, and they tackled them as pros.
Speaking of Progress Planner, they’re hosting an interesting Copywriting challenge webinar next week.
- WooCommerce released 9.7.1, a security release. If you haven’t, make sure you update sooner rather than later. Woo is also planning to adding shipment tracking into WooCommerce Core.
And preparing the 9.8 (first beta)launch for the end of this month. Make sure you’re aware what’s going to change there. I can already share with you that the admin will yet again become faster and smoother! This is the first release cycle that will follow WooCommerce’s new release process, btw.
- Your next WordPress installation might not need MySQL. Maybe SQLite is all you need. For instance, WordPress Playground only works with SQLite, and it covers the vast majority of use cases. But yeah, SQLite is mostly misunderstood because it is more effective for hyper-scale application. Here’s a way to remedy that.
Riza Maulana shared a cool script to use Herd (a local development tool for the Laravel world) more seamless with WordPress.
🚀 Performance & Security
- Speculative Loading will be part of WordPress 6.8, and it unlocks a huge potential to boost your WordPress site’s performance. Learn all about it in the dev notes.
- Google’s updated CrUX Vis – their experimental CrUX tool to allow you to visualize CrUX History API data.
- Ever wondered why we need both CSRF protection and CORS? CSRF (Cross-Site Request Forgery) prevents unauthorized actions on your behalf, while CORS (Cross-Origin Resource Sharing) manages resource sharing between different origins. Both are essential for web security.
- Chrome 134 is here, and that means updated DevTools 🥳. We’ve got a privacy and security panel, and Calibrated CPU throttling for web performance analysis now. As well as dim 3rd-party scripts in performance traces and more! All you have to do is update your Chrome browser to the latest version. Easy-peasy.
- Umar Hansa wrote about the DevTools flame chart, and other features as well. Good read from DebugBear.
- Prefetching is one of the techniques you can use to optimize the performance of your website. But, you can go too far with this. It can actually slow down your site as well. This article explains this wonderfully.
I use Perfmatters for all sites where I want to do Prefetching and Preloading, btw.
My favorite Performance Optimizing tools in WordPress:
- NitroPack: Cloud based performance optimizations
- Perfmatters: Clean up Scripts, and optimize WordPress
- WP Rocket: The best Front-end optimization plugin
- Code Profiler for WordPress
🔆 Within WordPress Highlight
Although this week’s highlight is not directly related to WordPress, it most assuredly is in every other way. This week’s highlight is about thanks.dev. An initiative to help you to donate to the open source projects in your dependency tree.
I’m already sponsoring various WordPress contributors, how about you?
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
💡 Interesting Finds
- If you’re selling things with Stripe, you will need to battle scammers. Here’s a list of more than 4000 disposable email domains used by scammers.
- Super useful (and free) tool called SkipDNS for checking a migrated site before it is fully propagated, no need to modify hosts file. Hat tip Jeff Star for sharing this.
- Looks like Digg will yet again be a thing!
- I’m using Obsidian for my Personal Knowledge Management (PKM) system. I was looking to pull in more data from Apple Health data into my Daily Obsidian notes and was expecting to have to code something myself. Vibe Coding and all that. But no need as I found the most wonderful plugin built by Carlo Zottmann called Actions For Obsidian. The best onboarding I’ve seen in a long while, and superbly built functionality.
🎁 Bonus
🎙️ The Within WordPress featured someone who’s been a literal integral part of the early days of the Internet (as whole) as well as being present at the very first iteration of JavaScript. Yup, that made for a wonderful conversation with Wes Tatters from Rapyd Cloud.
Are you Vibe Coding yet? I genuinely think you’re massively missing out if you’re not finding a way to incorporate this in your coding workflow.
That’s it for this week’s edition of Within WordPress. Thanks for reading!
Leave a Reply