Building Membership Sites + Cloudflare Goodies

Number 77. Just like that. In your inbox. In the week where I crossed 10K followers on Twitter, number 77 of Inside WordPress drops in your inbox. Where “your” crossed the 800 mark. Coincidence? I think not!

Glad you’re all here! Means a lot to me 💙

Lots to cover this week, so let’s dive in!

🗞️ Inside WordPress News

Here’s what I saw happening this past week:

Reusable Block will (probably) be renamed to Patterns!

Not sure if you’ve ever used them, but I’m very happy to see this change. Not everybody’s seen it as such, but when you really think about it, Reusable Blocks are patterns. We just need a better UI and UX for it now that Patterns are starting to be used more and more.

Are you using patterns or reusable blocks yet?

The Within WordPress podcast saw the release of my interview with Brad Williams. We’ve both been around WordPress for well over 15 years, so there definitely was some going back in time, but we spoke a lot about contributing to WordPress, and particularly, the Five for the Future project. Brad had lots of interesting things to say, and as always, I highly recommend you check it out.

It seems I forgot to add a link to Justin Tadlock’s article on the WordPress developer blog in the previous edition of Inside WordPress. This is me correcting that mistake.

If you’ve been subscribed longer to this newsletter, you’ll know I’m a fan of use case written out. Gravity Wiz published another great example of this. It’s called Automating Membership Registration with Populate Anything, and it’s a great read.

I’m sure you can find how to use what you’ve learned from this case study quite easily.

🚀 Performance

Cloudflare has been offering Workers for years now, but as of this week, they’ve released Cloudflare Snippets. Kinda like workers with rule-based pattern matching in it, but on steriods.

This may seem as an odd one in this section, but click on through, and you’ll understand. Especially on the Technical SEO side of things.

Another Cloudflare blog post to share with you. It’s about how Kinsta used Workers KV to improve their cache hit rates by more than 50%.

Smart solution. We need more of those!

My favorite performance optimizing tools in WordPress:

🔆 Inside WordPress Highlight

Contributing to WordPress can be a daunting thing to get started with. But it can also be very low-level like helping out with translations. There are also tickets out there for Gutenberg and Site Editor, that are quite actionable when you know how to code, but feel like WordPress Core is a bridge to far. Rich Tabor shared a list on Twitter with said actionable items.

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

Aleyda Solis shared httpstatus.io this week. It’s a great (free) tool to quickly check in bulk the HTTP status of any URLs simulating major search bots, and it’s also mobile friendly.

📖 What I am reading

Two longer articles caught my eyes this past week:

Hackers can steal cryptographic keys by video-recording power LEDs 60 feet away This one mostly had me mumbling things like GTFOH. But yeah, another security thing thing mitigate.
The second is a bit more uplifting. Sorta. Well, it’s about space. Doesn’t get more uplifting than that, I think? It’s called A deep dive into the burgeoning space economy. And when they say it’s deep, they mean it.

🎁 Bonus

My bonus for this week is another tutorial (based on a use case). This one’s from Alex Vazquez about building a membership site.