And there we have it, WordPress 6.9. With it, we’re slowly moving into the quietest part of the year for WordPress. Or any other project, for that matter. But not me, tho. I will take some vacation days towards the end, but I’m putting the final bits in place for quite a few launches in 2026.
This year has very much been me quietly building and preparing, but 2026 will be full of releases. Of all the kinds. Cannot wait to share this with all of you!
Anyway, on to this week’s newsletter. Hope you enjoy it!
🗞️ Within WordPress News
Here’s what I saw happening this past week:
- And there it was: the release of WordPress 6.9. It all happened during the 2025 State of the Word.
Here to watch if you haven’t just yet. Rae, over at The Repository, did an outstanding job of writing out what happened at the event .
- If you’ve been eyeballing my
Make WordPress Fast course but haven’t purchased it just yet, now’s the time to jump in. It will be released this month, and it will not be this cheap again. The TL;DR of my 25-module course is that it’s about the philosophy of performance. How to build fast for every single layer and not just fix slow.
- Many people have asked Felix Arntz over the past few months how he built the Gutenberg-like UI in his AI Services plugin for WordPress. Resulting in him now
finally abstracting out that piece so you can easily use it for your own plugin UI as well.
What I’m learning from this, really, is that Felix is susceptible to peer pressure, and I’m now actively contemplating how to make use of this knowledge 😛
- James Welbes recently made both his
RoadMapWP plugin freely available, as well as his YouTube for WordPress plugin. Both have been mentioned before in the Within WP newsletter, so it made sense to share this move again, right? Both are really cool plugins. You should check them out.
- Here’s a fun project to learn from. Brian Coords created
a WordPress native RSS reader . He’s using many modern WordPress components like DataViews, so next to it being a cool thing to self-host, it’s also very fun to learn from.
- WordPress 6.9 introduced block.json v3. If you haven’t looked into what that means, check out
Ronald Hueraca‘s article on it . It’s super important to understand.
- Per Søderlind has been busy again. His
Virtual Media Folders plugin brings virtual folder organization to your WordPress Media Library. Organize your media files into hierarchical folders without moving files on disk, folders are virtual, so your URLs never change.
- ACF and ACF PRO 6.7 now available. Say hello to
Inline Editing for ACF Block , the most intuitive block-building upgrade yet. Content editors can now edit ACF Block fields directly in the preview, no side panel, no switching, with zero additional JS or custom markup required.
I’ve said it before,
- Did you know that
WordPress Studio now has Beta features that you can enable and try out? They will rotate with each release and are a great way to see what’s coming in Studio.
- Have you seen how
Omnisend solves migration pain for new customers coming from other email & SMS marketing systems? Switching doesn’t feel like moving day chaos because Omnisend makes the move suck less, and the setup scales with the account size. Get 30% off on all plans for 3 months with this special code .
- Ian Svoboda shows us
how you can easily add Google Fonts or your own custom fonts to a block theme and how you can customize the generated @font-face rules if needed.
🤖 WordPress & AI
- WordPress’s vibe-coding experiment, Telex, has already been put to real-world use,
according to TechCrunch .
- As was discussed at State of The Word this year, AI in WordPress needs buy-in from two key groups: developers and hosts. Jason Adams has written great guides for both:
AI for WordPress Hosts and AI for WordPress Developers .
Both are excellent articles to get familiar with, regardless of whether you fall in either bucket.
🚀 Performance & Security
- After years of inactivity, the
WordPress plugin for Cloudflare’s APO is finally being developed on again. In fact, by Barry Kooij and yours truly. Time to put Cloudflare APO back into your performance toolbelt. Plenty of improvements are coming your way!
NitroPack’s Black Friday may only be available for a few more hours, so get it while you can, but you should check them out anyway as the perfect set-and-forget WordPress performance optimization solution.
🔆 Within WordPress Highlight
Jonny Harris shared a major performance improvement that has landed in WordPress 6.9: consistent cache keys for all query groups.
This change will have a huge impact on sites running a persistent object cache at scale. After two years of tweaks, WordPress 6.9 rolled out consistent cache keys for query groups like posts, comments, and users, slashing memory waste on high-traffic sites with persistent object caches.
Old versions bloated caches by baking content change timestamps into keys, stranding stale data; now, keys stay steady while freshness checks live inside the entries, letting updates overwrite efficiently for sharper hit rates and smoother scaling.
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
- Here’s a simple web page showing all of the information
that is being sent by your browser . And it’s a LOT more than you think. - View Transitions just learned how to multitask with the rest of the page.
Scoped View Transitions let you run multiple, fluid transitions at the same time, all with just a few lines of CSS. - Corey Maass just leveled up his free tool:
img.express now combines his client-proof image cropper (lock aspect ratio + size, send a link, no more disastersily disasters) with a slick logo grid resizer that turns chaotic piles of logos into perfectly uniform homepage heroes in seconds.
🛒 WooCommerce News
- Brian Coords demonstrated the new Terms Query Loop Block offering we received in WordPress 6.9 in conjunction with the Block Bindings API. Check out his
Product Category Image block for WooCommerce .
🔎 Scanfully Updates
We posted a big explainer of what we’ve been busy at over at Scanfully. Because truth be told, we’ve been just about radio silent for months… and yeah, there was good reason for that. We ripped Scanfully’s entire database design apart and rebuilt it from scratch for bigger sites and bulletproof security. Full database rewrite. Zero glamour. All muscle.
We wrote about it in detail in our
🎁 Request
I finally got around to redoing the testimonial part of the
That’s it for this week’s edition of Within WordPress. Thanks for reading!
Best, Remkus
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