Blocknotes, Johannes & Woo News

Some of you were expecting a newsletter last Friday and were sad I didn’t let you know in advance I wasn’t going to send one. Sorry 😅?

So yeah, I was at WordCamp Europe in Athens last week. Meeting old friends, and making new ones, but hardly behind my computer, number 76 had to wait.

Until today. Let’s dive in!

🗞️ Inside WordPress News

Here’s what I saw happening this past period:

Johannes was released. Johannes is a UX kit for WordPress. It’s an open-source wireframe kit that will help you for your next WordPress design project.

And I think it’s pretty neat. I think I would have called it Coster, but that’s maybe because I’m Dutch 😏. Either way, I love projects like this. Uniform all the things where it makes sense, right?

Justin Tadlock published a very thorough overview of things that are available for WordPress developers. If you haven’t checked it out yet, consider this the push you needed.

Gotta say, I really enjoy what’s happening over at the WordPress Developer Blog. The content, the depth, the variety, the help. It’s truly marvelous. Kudos to all involved!

Felix Arntz was apparrently even more annoyed with the Q&A format & procedings during WordCamp Europe than I was, because he created a wonderful thread on how to fix, improve, and better everything about it.

And I agree with all points. Let’s never repeat what we’ve done so far. Let’s improve, let’s do better!

This one I found curious. Liquid Web (allong with it Nexcess, StellarWP and Modern Tribe) was sold to One Equity Partners. And the curious part about it was that there was hardly any buzz around it.

If anyone has a clue to why, I’d love to know! It seems like a huge deal to me…

Security.txt is a file that communicates your security policy. This is one of those helpful files you can add to your site’s root. Mustafa Uysal released a WordPress plugin that serves this file for you. Nice and easy one!

Bowe Frankema released the long anticipated big update to their Dollie service. It’s called Dollie Control HQ and it’s definitely not the WordPress site management you’re used to.

Highly recommend you check it out!

Last, but certainly not least. Meet Blocknotes. Its title may not trigger you to click the link, but you’re gonna wanna check it out. It’s WordPress running on your phone. Yes. The future is finally here.

🚀 Performance

WooCommerce will introduce a high-performance order storage solution in the second part of this year

And I don’t know about you, but this gets me pretty excited. I maintain quite a few high volume WooCommerce stores for clients, and there’s not a single one that’s not going to benefit from this. Au contraire.

Dropbox released their findings of their research into the impact of HTTP3 on network latency for search.

Nice deep dive into what HTTP3 offers, and what it solves specifically.

I wanted to do a special shoutout for Object Cache Pro. If you’ve never heard of it, listen to my podcast with Till Krüss where he explains ins and out of the plugin. But really, it’s more like a solution than “just another plugin”.

My favorite performance optimizing tools in WordPress:

🔆 Inside WordPress Highlight

Ever needed to upload ridiculously large files in your WordPress site? Sure you’ve run into upload limits when you did. Well, no longer! Because, yeah, there is a plugin for that.

Some of my favorite WordPress tools:

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

💡 Interesting Finds

I was today’s years old when I discovered I can just declare aspect ratios in CSS.
OpenAI introduced Function Calling. Absolutely a gamechanger for their API. Here’s a good explanation what you can do with it.

🎁 Bonus

My bonus for this week is a geeky one. It’s a Cloudflare Worker that allows you to send transactional emails. Like, super cool 😍