We’re heading into the season of festivities, aren’t we? WordPress is RC’ing it up to the fourth, so that means we’re getting there! WordPress 6.7 will be released early next week, so start planning.
And while you’re planning, be sure to find your way to WordCamp Sofia as I’ll be speaking there about “How To Always Build a Fast WordPress Site“.
Until then, let’s cover some WordPress news and tools, right? Hope you enjoy it!
🗞️ Within WordPress News
Here’s what I saw happening this past week:
- Comme d’habitude, Kinsta wrote up an excellent overview of what WordPress 6.7 offers.
- That said, if you prefer a very visual approach, I highly recommend you check out my friend Jamie Marsland‘s 250 second walk-through.
- One of the cooler plugins of late is PersonalizeWP. I’ve featured them here before, but their recent update makes me want to share them again. It’s now fully integrated with everything blocks, patterns, and templates. Fully FSE compatible. And super powerful what you can do with it, at that.
And if you’re wondering what the heck that plugin does… just check ‘m out. It does what it says on the tin.
- WordPress 6.7 will see the Preview Dropdown Menu extended. Which means, plugin builders can now hook into that and create custom format previews (for instance for social media shares) and create specialized preview modes (Dark mode springs to mind here).
- Jono Alderson, whom we all know because of his most excellent SEO skills and insights, shared a very interesting article about Schema and how it may not do (or does it?!) what it’s supposed to do. It’s called “What if Schema.org is just… Labels?” and it’s well worth your read.
- The team at Awesome Motive released a plugin that I think will make a lot of people very happy. It solves the problem we have with the horrible presentation of statistics we get with GA4. It’s called OnePageGA.
Now, don’t get me wrong, it’s not enough to pull me back into Google Analytics, but if I was, this would be the solution I’d role with. I think.
- On that note, Koko Analytics, my favorite WordPress analytics tool, released version 1.4.4. It includes a new tool to import your historical stats data from Jetpack Stats. Very cool stuff, Danny!
- I’m not a Bricks guy. But that doesn’t mean I don’t think it has a place in our WordPress ecosystem. To that end, I’d like to share a new interesting website by Khan where you can download free templates for the Bricks Builder.
- The new WordPress Design System was released as a Figma Library.
- Did you know there’s a style guide in the shape of a full design library for all things WooCommerce? Yup, there totally is. Like, for instance, if you wanted to add Charts, this would be the way to do it.
- Speaking of WooCommerce, here’s what’s next for the Product Editor. It’s going to lean in very heavy on the newer WordPress Data Forms and Data Views.
- AnyoneCanWP is getting ready for their big showdown. They have a great lineup of judges who will be evaluating the most innovative WordPress projects to determine the ultimate winners. Sign up for their AnyoneCanWP Hackathon Demo Day for the 10th of this month. The Big Reveal will be the day after.
- The Accessibility Checker by Equalize Digital got a big update. It’s now not just identifying issues, but it’s fixing them as well!
- Are you aware that WordPress 6.7 is stabilizing content-only editing for blocks? If you’re not quite sure what content-only editing entails, don’t worry! The latest Developer Blog article has all the information you need.
- When asked what the second most popular e-commerce solution on WordPress is, most people will answer EDD. But, as of this month, that is no longer the case. SureCart, as Adam Preiser shared, is gaining momentum and that effectively means they’re the #2 now.
Very impressive, Adam! Congrats on that huge milestone.
- WordPress FSE block themes have come a long way in just a short amount of time. It’s made for much easier in-site editing without need for programming. However, in some instances information might be needed for more advanced coding. Sharon Murphy wrote about how you can do exactly that.
🚀 Performance & Security
- Fixing your OPcache Config can, in some cases, speed up your PHP application by a factor of 3.
- Chrome Dev Tools now lets you monitor your local and real-user performance (Core Web Vitals) via the Performance panel. Open the panel and you’ll immediately see how your local experience performs – no recording necessary.
🔆 Within WordPress Highlight
The default WordPress installation from wordpress.org automatically transmits extraneous information via various HTTP calls. Some of this data may be cause for concern from a privacy perspective.
There’s a plugin that limits that information, attempting to further protect your privacy in the process. Simply install the WP API Privacy plugin and activate it, and various aspects of WordPress that are questionable from a privacy perspective will be modified.
💡 Interesting Finds
- New CSS that can actually be used in 2024
- I’ve replaced my Apple Notes + ProNotes with Obsidian.
- Please publish and share more.
🔎 Scanfully Updates
Black Friday is upon us, it’s time to get our WooCommerce sites prepared. Right?
That’s it for this week’s edition of Within WordPress. Thanks for reading!
Best, Remkus
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