Faster Translations + Patterns as Text Snippets

Lots to share for the 85th edition of Inside WordPress. Let’s dive right in, hope you enjoy it!

Today’s Inside WordPress is sponsored by NitroPack.

They’re organizing webinars together with Google. And it’s time for their second one all about “Interaction to Next Paint (INP)”. One of the most important metrics. Dive deep into the nuances of this upcoming responsiveness metric and stay ahead in the Core Web Vitals game.

Reserve your free spot today!

🗞️ Inside WordPress News

Here’s what I saw happening this past week:

Big Bite, in partnership with 10up, Alley, Human Made, Inpsyde, and XWP have released a free WordPress for Enterprise guide.

But that’s not all. They’re also asking for feedback and input in a survey. It covers questions such as budgets, publishing processes, platform strengths, user frustrations, custom functionality, infrastructure, architecture, and ongoing maintenance.

If you’re working with “bigger budget” clients in WordPress in any way shape or form, you should let your voice be heard!

It’s extremely important for WordPress to finally get this right. The trickle down effect is massive when we do.

Juliette Reinders Folmer announced that WordPress is now beta compatible with PHP 8.3. This means that everything they could find between static analysis and the tests has been fixed and CI passes on PHP 8.3, and CI is no longer allowed to fail. Also see this ticket for a complete overview of all things WP and PHP 8.3.

Super grateful for the work Juliette and Sergey Biryokov are doing. If you’d like to learn more about the impact of WordPress and testing, do check out the podcast I did with Juliette. Spoiler alert: it’s HUGE!

By now you’re probably aware that FSE themes use a theme.json. But did you know it also allows for custom settings? Justin Tadlock explains how to do this perfectly here.

As a reminder, if you feel you’re not ready for full-on FSE Themes, Bill Erickson has a Hybrid WordPress starter theme. It is using theme.json, PHP templates, and ACF blocks.

Silvan Hagen published a snippet that allows you to disable some WordPress blocks for all users, the right way.

I’ve already added it to a couple of mulit-user sites I maintain. Thanks for sharing, Silvan!

🚀 Performance

Performant Translations was released this week. It’s a plugin built by the WordPress Core Performance Team and it’s the result of their research into how to best built a more performant version of loading translations in WordPress. This will eventually get loaded into WordPress Core, but it’s important as many of you start testing it ASAP.

I’ve installed in on 8 high traffic sites with extremely varying configurations and every single one of them got faster.

My favorite performance optimizing tools in WordPress:

🔆 Inside WordPress Highlight

Ronald Hueraca published a very detailed guide about Block.json Version 3. He explains what’s different in this version, which shipped with WordPress 6.3, for Plugin and Theme Developers.

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

Mike McAlister has been killing it with his videos on OllieWP lately. The one I found especially nice was this one where he explains how we can use patterns to our advantage, like using them as text snippets!
CSS Loaders: A collection of more than 500 loading animations The biggest collection of CSS-only loaders. More than 500 loading animations made by Temani Afif using a single element. h/t Alex Bouma

📖 What I am reading

The concept of the atomic void is one of the most repeated mistakes in popular science. Molecules are packed with stuff.

If you find this even remotely interesting, I have just the explainer to read for you.

🎁 Bonus

My bonus for you this week is my Within WordPress podcast with Jason Cohen. Yes, the founder of WP Engine. We had an hour long conversation where Jason shared a wealth and depth of information I know you’ll appreciate. Spoken from the WP Engine perspective, but there’s so much to learn for everbody here!

Highly, highly recommend!