It was again a week full of interesting bits. There’s also a very interesting WooCommerce guide to the EU guarantee notices now in effect, plus Gutenberg controls and a Chrome debugging walkthrough. Lots to cover, let’s jump in, eh?
Hope you enjoy it!
Whether you use the Cloudflare Free or Pro plan, with
🎓 From The Guild
I have had half a dozen conversations in the past month alone that were around someone needing
🗞️ Within WordPress News
Here’s what I saw happening:
- Excellent news for WordPress releases! They are
moving from conference stages to livestreamed Zoom webinars , starting with 7.2 in early December. More of the release squad can take part without travelling, and the release no longer has to fit an event date. Everyone else can watch and ask questions; joining details will follow closer to the release.
I liked the idea, but it’s sooo constrained and forced; it was never going to be successful for everyone.
- Playground is slowly getting more and more complete. Playground’s
new Email tool lets you inspect a form notification, welcome message, or order email under Dev Tools → Email, including an HTML preview.
Curious if you’re using it yet, and if so… what are you doing with it?
- More blocks, fewer missing controls.
Gutenberg 24.1’s release walkthrough shows backgrounds, colors, and shadows reaching more blocks, plus text-shadow controls in Global Styles, Paragraph, and Heading. Cover and Media & Text also get media selection in the sidebar. Block developers also get a public API for viewport-specific styles in custom controls , using the same helpers as core blocks.
- Rino went from using no-code Page Builders to building a building something a plugin that does page building. Rino de Boer’s
Pencil lets clients edit text, buttons, and images on the frontend while the theme controls the design; ACF and WooCommerce content stay managed elsewhere. Version 0.9.2 is a public prerelease .
Check it out because it’s a very interesting approach!
- Installing an MCP plugin should leave you with something useful to do. Brian Coords
argues for a clearer route from installation to managing a WordPress site : a separate Core Abilities plugin, better MCP setup, and WordPress.org pages that explain the options to people and agents.
These are proposals, not an agreed-upon roadmap. The interesting question is how all the good individual pieces become a usable product. I cannot wait for that to happen. In the meantime,
- An agent choosing WordPress and an agent finishing a WordPress job are two different tests. Andy Peatling makes that distinction in
this WP Minute roundtable with Matt Medeiros, Alex Panagis, Brian Coords and Mike McAlister. Must watch!
BTW, start around 14 minutes for the proposed benchmarks; the wider conversation weighs setup friction, visual editing, and the cost of agent workflows.
- John Fraskos and Krishna Kant Chourasiya are building
Delta , a WordPress theme an agent operates through MCP, writing pages and templates in HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. The site has examples to inspect, while the block editor stays available for content Delta isn’t managing as HTML. This is early development, but looks very promising!
- Two experiments tackle the jump between wp-admin and the Site Editor. Brian Coords
puts Styles, Templates, Patterns and Navigation under Appearance , keeping the existing sidebar. James Koster keeps navigation and editing in one admin shell , including the trip into a template part and back without a reload. Compare the trade-offs if you spend time explaining these interfaces to clients.
Both are experiments, btw; Brian’s Playground runs WordPress nightly, and changes disappear on refresh or close.
- An estimated 135,000 installs at its peak, but only about $8,900 in total Pro sales. Pavel Ciorici
explains why Social Icons Widget became WPZOOM Connect , adding chat features as a route into Yamidoo while keeping icons and sharing buttons working.
The post includes the numbers and an unhappy user’s objection to AI appearing in an unrelated plugin as well. Good read.
- With all these AI capabilities around us now, how are you doing? Are you stuck in your role? Has your role become your identity? Have you embraced AI’s influence on your role yet?
I have some thoughts on that .
- Russell Aaron
talks about and takes aim at plugin pricing built around the next sale : if customers know the discount is coming, the list price becomes an opening offer. The more useful test in Russell’s argument is what a buyer gets on first install and whether support, integrations, and maintenance justify paying when a small feature can be copied with AI.
OpenStation 1.1.11 keeps an unsent note reachable when conversion to a post fails in its desktop-style WordPress admin. Daniel López describes a release spent testing and polishing, with clearer failure messages and fixes for Jetpack Stats. Nice to see the solutions progressing!
🚀 Performance & Security
- More CSS, less work at runtime. GitHub’s
migration from CSS-in-JS to CSS Modules cut server-rendering time by 55% and component initialization time by 25% in the initial Primer migration.
Fun read!
- Koko Analytics 2.5.3
processes tracking backlogs in chunks , reducing memory pressure when traffic spikes or WP-Cron falls behind. Danny van Kooten explains where the database work happens and why traffic patterns affect the savings.
- A Turnstile (by Cloudflare) widget on the page is only half the setup. Your backend still needs to validate the token through Siteverify.
Turnstile Spin guides a coding agent through both sides, including repairs for widgets missing server-side validation and migrations from another CAPTCHA.
- One less set of breakpoints to maintain. Safari 27 now supports
sizes="auto"for lazy-loaded images, joining Chrome 126+ and Firefox 150+: the browser uses the rendered width when choosing from srcset.WordPress has added this to eligible images since 6.7 . Keep width and height attributes and fallback sizes for older browsers, and keep autopaired withloading="lazy"; it isn’t a reason to lazy-load your main hero image.
- You no longer need an XHR request to use replay in Chrome’s Network panel:
DevTools 152’s Resend command also handles fetch requests . Performance Live Metrics also reports Core Web Vitals for client-side soft navigations, so you can inspect the next view in an app without a full-page load.
- Cloudflare’s
September 25 emergency WAF release adds blocking rules for WordPress path traversal/local file inclusion, labelled CVE-2026-87902, and comment XSS in the Cloudflare Managed Ruleset. If you use that ruleset, check the relevant WordPress rules and any overrides on your site.
🔆 Within WordPress Highlight
A good blog post worth your time from Marco Almeida! Marco talks about how a customer buys your Pro add-on, uploads it, clicks Activate, and gets an error page. Lovely first impression. Marco
Marco weighs the automatic installation of the free companion against keeping the Requires Plugins header. An automatic installer also means dealing with permissions, FTP credentials, multisite, and failed downloads. Marco is keeping the header and clarifying the installation order in purchase emails and documentation.
💡 Interesting Finds
- Valid XML, broken destinations. Joost de Valk
found sitemaps pointing at redirects, 404s and noindex pages while developing Sitemap Inspector’s optional live URL checks . The examples show what to look for on your own sites. These checks use the responses your browser receives, though; this isn’t a report of Google’s indexing status.
- Cloudflare’s
new cfCLI is in open beta, covering more than 3,000 API operations with JSON output and a command search for agents. The walkthrough shows the new TypeScript configuration and how to migrate a Worker; the open-source Forge pipeline generates the API commands.
- Miriam Schwab’s
Make My Site Agent Ready 1.53.1 adds configurable excerpts and descriptions to Markdown frontmatter, including Yoast’s resolved description and a filter for other sources. You can compare the HTML and Markdown versions on the plugin’s own page .
Miriam also offers a useful reality check: in the tests described on that page, agents mostly ignored the extra files and read the HTML.
- One for the Omarchy users (I’m a recent convert for my second machine, and I love it!): Bjarne Øverli’s
Flux connects your desktop with an Android phone or a Mac for files, clipboard sharing and notifications. The CLI can notify you when a build finishes.
- For a browser break, Hugo Duprez’s
Destroy Any Website turns a page into a destructible game, complete with multiplayer. Bring a laptop; the game isn’t available on mobile.
🛒 WooCommerce News
- Selling goods to EU consumers? The harmonized legal-guarantee notice applies from 27 September 2026. Marco Almeida’s
WooCommerce guide walks through placement, product eligibility and order emails , alongside Naked Cat Plugins’ own implementation. The separate GARAN label is for a producer’s free durability guarantee covering the whole product for more than two years, when the producer makes that information available to the seller. A shop warranty or a motor-only guarantee doesn’t qualify. Use the official EU guidance and artwork , and check the applicable national rules for your store.
- WooCommerce’s
PHP 8.1 minimum is now set for 11.6, planned for February 2027 , giving stores an extra release beyond the original 11.5 proposal. Version 11.3 will warn stores on PHP 7.4 or 8.0, but will still run on those versions. Plan the upgrade with your host, back up, and test the store’s checkout, extensions, and scheduled jobs on staging first (soon with Scanfully!).
- If you opted into WooCommerce’s experimental Dual API,
11.2 moves the engine into a separate plugin . The product and coupon proof-of-concept endpoints are being removed, and installing the plugin won’t bring those endpoints back.
That’s it for this week’s edition of Within WordPress. Thanks for reading!
Best, Remkus
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