This past weekend I was among fellow “hackers” for 2024’s CloudFest Hackathon, and WP Day (with talks) on the Monday following. It was my second time, but just like last year, it was a lot of fun and great conversations were had.
If you’ve never been to CloudFest, it’s like a more focused Contributor Day combined with a solid hallway track. Networking is very much part of the days. And I had plenty of folks to connect with in relation to Scanfully. So, yes, I had a lot of fun.
CloudFest wasn’t the only thing happening this week, though. Lot’s of other WordPress related news as well.
Let’s jump in, shall we?
🗞️ Within WordPress News
Here’s what I saw happening this past week:
- I’ve made no secret of having Ollie being my favorite Site Editor (FSE) theme, but having played a lot more this week with Rockbase, I highly recommend you check that one out. I’ve mentioned it in last week’s newsletter, but it bears repeating. It’s versatile, flexible, and fast.
It might actually become my new favorite base theme 😅
- And just to show I’m still in love with Ollie as well, here’s a wonderful site rebuild to an Ollie based site by Brian Coords. Gives you great insight in what can be done.
- Ian joined the YouTubing ranks and launched his Learn WP Dev channel. Ian touches blocks and modern theme building in depth, and a lot.
We talked about this topic a lot on my podcast with him, btw.
- Speaking of WordPress folks opening up YouTube channels, here’s a different one for you. Sabrina Zeidan created a YouTube channel about her moving to Spain and living offgrid and the challenges she faces as she’s improving her 123 year old house without electricity and running water.
- WordPress 6.5 (any day now) is introducing Plugin Dependencies (for plugins).
- The WP Consent API plugin, the solution to consent communication issues between cookie banners, plugins and services in WordPress, is now integrated in Google Site Kit and WooCommerce.
- Ron Huereca published a very cool plugin that’s designed to help us with managing our patterns. It’s called Pattern Wrangler. Currently only on GitHub, but it’s been submitted to wp.org.
- Ana Cirujano plugins a neat tool called Ploogins.io. It’s an AI-powered WordPress plugin recommender. Just tell it what functionality it’s after and you’ll receive a tailored list of plugin suggestions.
Neat!
- This (WordPress plugin pricing cheating with discounts) doesn’t happen in the WordPress Community en mass, but I’m sad to see this is happening.
Be better, WordPress plugin and services builders. Also too bad Rob Howard chose to publish this on Medium, but that’s me ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
- WordPress needs marketing efforts. I think we can all agree on that if we compare ourselves with the efforts of Wix and Squarespace. To that effect, a WordPress Media Corps is in the works.
This short paragraph doesn’t do it justice, so please read the full article by Josepha. I think it has a lot of potential.
- Courtney Robertson published a full, and I do mean a full overview of what’s new in WordPress 6.5.
- WooCommerce 8.7 was released. It not triggering regressions (🤐) this time is not what I want you focus one, but the new format of their release posts. Because that is soooo much better.
- A while back I shared Brian Coords thoughts on version control and Git. Claudio Rimann also shared his thoughts on the subject matter: Git going with FSE and Block Theme Development.
Two AI driven solutions were published this week:
- One is called QuickWP and is an AI-powered WordPress Site Builder
- The other is called AgentWP and it promises to do anything with WordPress.
🚀 Performance & Security
- On the Chrome for Developers blog, an article about Performance Tooling in 2024 was published, and they talk a lot about what you can find in the browser Inspector.
- Konstantin Kovshenin shared a great performance friendly solution if you have to iterate over thousands of WordPress posts. And John Blackbourn and Kaspars Dambis added other options as well.
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
- Over the weekend Amber Hinds rebuilt her personal WordPress site in Twenty Twenty-Four and core blocks. Replacing the theme alone took the site from nearly 3000 unique accessibility errors to just over 100. She wrote about in an in-depth article.
Some of my favorite WordPress tools:
- The most versatile and accessible form solution for WordPress
- LocalWP, the easiest to use local dev solution
🎁 Bonus
I like to lift heavy weights. Iron, stones, you name, I lift it. It’s why I haven’t had any serious back problems in the last 20 years. Because I had too many before that. But here are a couple of other things I do to avoid back pain:
- Walk a minimum of 30 minutes a day fast paced.
- Sitting nearer to the edge of my chair.
- Getting up from my desk often.
- Squats, deadlifts, and sled pushes (no, you can’t avoid the weights)
- Stretching after workouts.
That’s it for this week’s edition of Within WordPress. Thanks for reading!
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