Welcome! Welcome to the very first Within WordPress newsletter ever. I’m excited to have both my podcast and newsletter under one umbrella. It was one of those things that kept nagging me. Glad I got that fixed. And speaking of being excited, I’m also pretty excited about WordPress’ Performance roadmap for 2024!
But there’s even more stuff to get excited about. Let’s get to it!
Get in front of dedicated WordPress friends and check out my sponsoring options and reach out to me if you think we can be a good fit!
🗞️ Within WordPress News
Here’s what I saw happening this past week:
- My fellow Dutchman and friend, Coen Jacobs, shared an amazing stat. His project Mozart has been downloaded over a million times!
If you’re not aware, it is the go-to tool to include libraries as it lets you prefix namespaces for use in WordPress plugins.
- Austin Ginder shares a solution to a very niche problem, but an interesting nonetheless. Why? Because I’ve had to use it one time. It’s on how to restore a navigation menu from a backup. And I love that he’s using WP CLI to do this!
- WordPress Playground, one of the coolest tools for WordPress out there, will now allow you to run wp-cli in terminal with Playground’s WebAssembly PHP.
Thanks again for all the work you do for WordPress Playground, Adam!
- I was reminded by Miriam Schwab‘s post on X that there’s a wizard for helping you figure out how to contribute to WordPress.
- He made it into the last Inside WordPress edition, and he’s made it into the first Within WordPress edition: my good friend Ronald Huereca. Not just because he’s a good friend, but because he keeps pumping out great tutorials. Simple as that. Today’s version is about how to make sure that wonderful plugin you built is compatible with WordPress’ Multi-site mode.
- WordPress VIP has published a webinar on California, WordPress, and a Modern Government CMS Strategy. You’ll have to leave your email address, but this webinar with 10up‘s Jake Goldman and Brian Bourn is a very interesting one to watch.
- Kent Riboe shared a very little plugin that solves one little problem with Gravatars. By default, gravatars are missing alt tags for the image. This plugin solves this. And I think it’s pretty neat.
- We have patterns, synced patterns, and now synced patterns overrides. Confusing? Yes. Powerful? Also yes. But it needs your feedback to make it great. Fabian Kaegy calls for anyone to pitch in and share examples of how you hope to use synced pattern overrides.
- Last one for today, and slightly related to Fabian’s question, is Brian Coords article about how to handle version control for Block Themes.
Being someone who has all mission-critical sites in version control (using git-flow, if you must know) as well, I find myself very much in alignment with his thoughts. I’m using the Create Block Theme plugin as well to make that happen properly, but it’s nowhere near perfect. Anyway, go and check out Brian’s article.
🚀 Performance & Security
- Learn about the key areas to watch out for in the pixels-to-screen pipeline that affect rendering performance
- Who stole my Largest Contentful Paint? Fun title, lots of things to learn about this ever so important performance metric
- Felix Arntz shared a neat little plugin that allows you to flush out all the transients in your WordPress installation.
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
What if you use just one plugin that would tell you exactly which of your plugins is slowing down your site like this:
Well, you can. This is just one of the many scenarios it can test, and make visual. The plugin is called Code Profiler and using coupon REMKUS will give you a nice 5% discount, btw.
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
- Native CSS Scoping is starting to hit browsers. Wes Bos shares an application for this new feature. Here’s an explainer on what it is.
- Borders in CSS are way more feature rich nowadays than how they started out. You just had border: 1px solid #c0c0c0 type of options and that was it. Nowadays, you’ve got CSS border-image property as well. Smashing Magazine explains.
🎁 Bonus
My little bonus for this week is this post on X I shared this week:
That’s it for this week’s edition of Within WordPress. Thanks for reading!
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