This was a big week. Lots of interesting things happening with WordPress 6.3 beta and discovering its features. But also with publishing another super interesting podcast, appearing on TWIW, and sharing a big decision.
Let’s jump into episode 79, hope you enjoy it!
🗞️ Inside WordPress News
Here’s what I saw happening this past week:
- Adam Zieliński shared how WordPress Playground was prototyped “in a week”.
WordPress Playground is one of the most exciting new things to have been launched this year. The potential here is staggering.
- I don’t usually share information about WordPress release updates, but I urge you to check out WordPress 6.3 beta 3. In it, you’ll find a revamped Site Editor with lots of improvements such as proper navigation management and such.
Aaand… it’s dropping support for PHP 5 🎉🥳
- Here’s an easy way to keep track of everything happening with Gutenberg. This will give you a good understanding of what’s coming in next versions of WordPress.
- This article by Bernhard Kau is 18 months old, but still new to a lot of folks using Block Patterns in Custom Post Types.
- I published a blog post containing a big decision I made over the last couple months.
- The 9th episode of the Within WordPress Podcast was published and it features the illustrious multi-talented Mario Peshev. I could tell you all about what he and I talked about, but it’s easier if you just check out the description here. And prepare to be in soaking-up-a-lot-of-great-information mode. 🤯.
🚀 Performance
- The new number of total WP.org plugins is 88K. Weston Rutter published a nice overview of what it took to download the entire WordPress plugin directory.
- A 13 year old ticket was closed that will now allow WordPress scripts to support “async” and “defer” attributes. Giving developers more control on when scripts are loaded and thus performance.
- Performance improvements to the metadata API will also hit WordPress 6.3
- Jonny Harris shared one line of PHP that allows you to speed up your WordPress front-end. Maybe check it out?
My favorite performance optimizing tools in WordPress:
- WP Rocket: Best Front-end optimization plugin
- Perfmatters: Cleaning up WordPress + script manager
- Nitropack: Cloud based performance optimizations
🔆 Inside WordPress Highlight
If you’re following me on Twitter, or perhaps seen me appear on the recent This Week in WordPress podcast, you’ll know I like WordPress only to do what it should do. With that in mind, I’d like to highlight a wonderful WordPress plugin that you totally would want to have inside your WordPress site. And that’s ClickWhale.
It’s a Linktree replacement, you know, one of those Link In Bio (LIB) solutions. Right inside your WordPress site. It allows you to track clicks, see statistics, etc as well. Full control over what your link in bio looks like without the incredible constrained environment from hosted solutions. A clean, “own your data” type of solution. I like it. They have a free and a pro version.
I like these solutions inside WordPress. This makes total sense. Definitely check them out if your LIB game could use improvement!
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’ve been using Cloudflare’s Malware DNS settings for almost three years now, but it occured to me this week that most folks have no idea these exist. You may know of 1.1.1.1, but did you know there’s also 1.1.1.2 (No Malware) and 1.1.1.3 (No Malware or Adult Content)? Learn all about it here.
- Did you know Gutenberg’s CSS is powered by Automatic CSS. Notice the singular t 😉.
📖 What I am reading
Been ordering a couple of books I saw in a list shared by Indiehacker and fellow Dutchman Danny Postma. Some real nuggets in that list.
🎁 Bonus
Today’s bonus is a very selfish one. It’s a WP and Performance related project Barry Kooij and I have been working on for a while now. We’re nowhere near version 1.0, but I would love for you to see what we’re cooking up with ScanFully.
That’s it for this week’s edition of Inside WordPress. Thanks for reading!
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