No newsletter last week, huh? What’s that about, I was asked. By quite a few of you. And I’m sorry for missing one, but this was a classic example of what the great poet Mr. John Lennon once sang about: “Life is what happens when you’re busy making other plans”.
So yeah…
At least I’ve got my entire first floor new carpets. I mean, there is a silver lining. For me 😅. All this to say, my friend, thank you for being here, and prepare yourself for a long newsletter!
Hope you enjoy it!
🗞️ Within WordPress News
Here’s what I saw happening this past week:
- WP Engine‘s
DE{CODE} 2025 event is around the corner. If you haven’t signed up yet, it’s an online event fully dedicated to all roles responsible for building digital experiences. This includes brand marketers and agency leaders, in addition to developers. The agenda has already been published, and looks great !
- WordPress Multisite is a powerful mode for WordPress. I’ve been using this mode since it was called WordPress MU. But, what’s unknown is often times feared, right? To help you see its potential, my friends at Human Made wrote an article highlighting its features, benefits, and use cases.
Check it out , it’s an excellent one.
- WooCommerce 9.8 was released this week and offers huge Store API upgrades with it. There’s now batching for all endpoints (which is a massive performance boost). There’s now a new PUT /checkout for real-time updates, and Brands now finally fully supported in the Store API.
Read up on a lot more details about this change .
Make sure you also check out the
- I completed my annual WordPress Professionals Survey over at The Admin Bar.
Have you ?
- On average, on Kinsta, a WordPress site running on their platform
has 21.7 active plugins . Can you guess what the highest number of plugins they found? I’ll give you a hint: it’s in the hundreds .
- Eduardo Villão just launched WP Since! It’s a cool
tool that scans your WordPress plugin and checks if it’s truly compatible with the minimum WP version you declared. It detects used functions, classes, methods, hooks; and warns you if anything requires a newer version.
Slightly related, there’s also a tool called
- Feeling overwhelmed by coding challenges? This article by Milana Cap
offers a refreshing perspective on embracing mistakes and learning through experimentation. It’s a must-read for anyone seeking to reduce stress and find joy in the coding journey, IMO.
ACF 6.4 is now available. This is a major release which brings WooCommerce HPOS support (🥳) to ACF PRO, with other fixes and improvements.
- Switch to better email & SMS marketing with Omnisend. Get the top-rated email marketing platform to convert & keep more customers.
Get started today !
- WordPress.com dropped an entire new AI integration this week, and it’s a very cool one. You can now
build a WordPress.com site in seconds with AI .
Prepare for WordPress 6.8
Since we’ll most likely
This week’s newsletter is highlighting what you should know if you’re building on top of WordPress for 6.8:
More Secure Password Storage with bcrypt
WordPress core now uses bcrypt for password hashing, making your site’s security even stronger. If your site uses any kind of custom authentication, double-check that it’s compatible with this new algorithm.
👉
Faster Navigation with Speculative Loading
A cool new feature called Speculative Loading uses the browser’s Speculation Rules API to preload pages users are likely to visit next. Want more control? There are new filters you can use to tweak or turn it off for certain URLs.
Smarter Block Editor Asset Loading
If you’re looking to keep things lightweight, the new should_load_block_assets_on_demand filter helps avoid loading unnecessary block assets on pages that don’t need them.
👉
REST API Gets Menu Access Control
The new rest_menu_read_access filter gives you finer control over what menus, menu items, and locations are publicly available through the REST API.
🌍 Internationalization Made Smoother
Good news for plugin developers: if your plugin is built for WordPress 4.6 or newer—even if it’s not in the WordPress.org directory—you don’t need to call load_plugin_textdomain() anymore.
👉
🛠️ A Slew of Developer-Focused Enhancements
From shortcode consistency to improvements in media handling, post type registration, and scheduling, WordPress 6.8 is packed with thoughtful updates that make developers’ lives a bit easier.
👉
🚀 Performance & Security
- Learn
how common URL phishing techniques work . This article explains subdomain spoofing, various types of lookalike domains and typosquatting, homoglyph attacks, URL shortening, open redirects, and abuse of legitimate services. Canon Printer Drivers Flaw Could Let Hackers Run Malicious Code . As if printers haven’t caused enough damage already 😅 - 📺 A
great video on how to validate your site speed optimization efforts
🔆 Within WordPress Highlight
Sometimes you have to highlight good work, don’t you? Well, my site was a mess. It was a bad mix of newsletter, podcast, and blog posts. And that’s not even mentioning the general design and UX mess. So, I needed clarity and help!
I reached out to
> Quick Wins – a fast video audit of one page or journey, focused on clear, easy fixes (€350) > Accelerator – more in-depth, with a discovery session and report to improve UX and flow across key areas (€1975) > Transformation – the full package: a deep audit that helps you overhaul your site (and your business) for long-term impact, compliance, and growth (€4475)
You can
💡 Interesting Finds
- Found this nifty free tool called
Holiday Optimizer that can turn 15 PTO into 53 days off! You put in the days of paid time off you get p;us preferred break strategy, and it plans out when you should go on vacation. Great example of a well-designed, useful side project.
- Just found a seriously useful little tool from Microsoft:
MarkItDown . It’s a lightweight Python script that converts all sorts of docs to clean, structured Markdown. I’m using it for Obsidian, but it’s also perfect for devs, content folks, or anyone wrangling messy formats, especially if you’re working with static sites or need Markdown for WordPress workflows.
- The
<select> element can now be customized with CSS . Chrome 135 debuts CSS-styleable select elements, letting developers transform their look with the sleek appearance: base-select property. Now, you can unleash rich HTML content within option elements and tap into new internal styling parts! - Are you using GitHub Actions? Did you know that GitHub’s CI/CD capabilities, commonly used for software development, can
also be applied to streamline and orchestrate data pipelines ? - I needed a solution that works with larger files than WeTransfer’s 2GB limit and found Swiss Transfer. They let you share up to 50GB for free. No account needed, blazing fast, and your data stays, you guessed it,
securely hosted in Switzerland .
🎁 Bonus
🎙️ For this week’s podcast, I sat down with Tadas Pukas from Omnisend. I had met Tadas during the CloudFest Hackathon, and I wanted to learn more from him about email marketing, as he’s Omnisend’s Product Manager. What followed was a conversation
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