Whole Lotta Woo, Block Hooks API & Noel Tock on WordPress’ Future

This doesn’t happen often, but we saw a delay in the scheduled release of WordPress 6.5, didn’t we? But… I dare say, for good reasons. The biggest one for me is the the whole conversation around “what do we do with the Font Library”.

I’ll explain down below what happened there, but it’s not the first time this feature became problematic 😬.

Lots of other news as well, so lets jump in, shall we?

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🗞️ Within WordPress News

Here’s what I saw happening this past week:

• WordPress Coding Standards, aka WordPressCS has seen its 3.1.0 release. This contains three new sniffs and updates for the upcoming WP 6.5 release.

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• The Block Hooks API, alongside the Bindings API and Interactivity API are the three additions to WordPress 6.5 that I get most excited about. Been playing a lot with the Bindings API already, but not yet the Block Hooks API. Luckily Nick Diego published a lengthy tutorial on how to start learning all there is to.

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• So… the Font Library. These issues on GitHub require your attention, your time, your voices:
  • Font Library: Handling for fonts that exist in the /fonts directory but have not been added in the Font Library https://github.com/WordPress/gutenberg/issues/59102
  • Reconsider placing uploaded fonts within the uploads directory https://github.com/WordPress/gutenberg/issues/59417

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• Woo will introduce a new Woo.com Update Manager. This new plugin will be released together with WooCommerce 8.8. If you’re using WooCommerce, there’s a high likelihood you’ll need to migrate to this plugin. Read all about it here.

Please also read Woo’s answers to questions raised about the new Update Manager. And there’s also information on Reddit.

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• Speaking of Woo, 8.8 will produce an onboarding wizard unlike anything you’ve ever seen. Again, working with WooCommerce? Educate yourself about the new options.

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• Did you know there’s a URL where you can keep track of everything happening with Gutenberg. It’s a great index for understanding what’s coming our way for the next editions of WordPress.

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• Rafal Tomal shares this hidden feature in WordPress. It’s one of my favorite little tools and I use it all the time!

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• Brian Coords shares his considerations on how to develop (with tools and methods) a Full Site Editor theme. Good read. Comme d’habitude!

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• For all you plugin developers out there who don’t like the “from GitHub to WordPress SVN repo” process: Tanner Record launched a solution.

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• Matt, of the Cromwell kind, shares his thoughts, and there are a LOT of thoughts, on how to optimize your plugin’s README file.

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🚀 Performance & Security

• PHP is often seen as an archaic and bad performing language, but it’s really not. Not by a long shot. I can, for instance, perfectly process one billion rows. Also known as “The One Billion Row Challenge”.
• I find myself being a big fan of Cloudflare’s R2 solution (as apposed to Amazon’s S3) and reading this tutorial about building a scalable and affordable image hosting pipeline was fun to read. And learn from.
• Austin Ginder shares Beacon. An extension to WP CLI that allows you to also verify-checksum for non WordPress.org plugins. LOVE IT!!

My favorite performance optimizing tools in WordPress:

• The best Front-end optimization plugin
• Cleaning up WordPress + script manager
• Cloud based performance optimizations

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🔆 Within WordPress Highlight

This graph is shared by Noel Tock in a thread on X. That thread is well worth your time to read. It’s about WordPress’ path to 43% market share, and how we’ve inverted relative demand and supply. And about what’s ahead.

That post, combined with this post below on X will be input for an interview I’m doing with Noel next week:

One of WordPress's biggest opportunities is reimagining the plugin ecosystem. I'm really excited at what we can achieve here.

Let's dive in… 1/🧵 pic.twitter.com/hK58ZAq7Kk

— Noel Tock 🇺🇦 (@noeltock) March 28, 2024

If you have any questions you’d like to see answered, dear reader, please reply to this newsletter and we’ll add it to our list of questions to answer.

Some of my favorite WordPress tools:

• The most versatile and accessible form solution for WordPress
• LocalWP, the easiest to use local dev solution

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💡 Interesting Finds

• Like, do we really need this? Not sure, but it’s cool AF. Freeze is a new CLI tool that generates terminal screenshots of code and ANSI output. You can simply run a single command to generate PNGs and SVGs of terminals with program output or syntax-highlighted code.

Use it in READMEs to show off code and CLI output!

• CSS Tricks is BACK with an article about Accessible Forms with Pseudo classes. Love it.
• GDPR may look like it’s not being enforced because you or your client’s site is getting away with it. So far.

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🎁 Bonus

🎙️ I spoke with my good friend Jonathan Bossenger about the Learn WordPress platform. We talked about its intent, why they’re not (enough) on YouTube and a whole lot of other topics. His answers made me super excited on the future of learn.wordpress.org. Go check out our conversation.