Number 90! When I picked my newsletter back up, I knew consistency was going to be the maker or breaker. I’m quite pleased we’re at number 90 of Inside WordPress.
Hope you all are too 🤗. Let’s get to it!
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🗞️ Inside WordPress News
Here’s what I saw happening this past week:
- Smashing Magazine published an opinionated article by Geoff Graham called “The Problem With WordPress Is Positioning, Not Plugins“.
It’s an interesting read, but Geoff focuses on the divide between .org and .com. I see an entirely different positioning problem being much more important.
We’ve entered the stage where WordPress is mature enough that anyone with the skills can build any type of site with it, for any type of crowd. And yes, that most certainly means Enterprise and/or high volume traffic.
But… for lots of people not familiar with WordPress, we’re still not taken seriously. Because we still support old and obsolete PHP version, because we don’t have OOP code, or something like that. Those in-the-know know that you can build hyper modern version of WordPress on the latest bleeding PHP version and use the most modern PHP and JavaScript approach.
But… it’s not the perception folks have. What do you think is the bigger positioning problem, {{ subscriber.first_name | strip | default: “dear reader” }}?
- Jonny, my favorite Spaced Monkey, is leaving XWP, but fortunately for us, not the world of WordPress.
I just love what he and the rest of the WordPress Core Performance Team have been doing this year for the betterment of WordPress. I’d be real sad if Jonny would no longer be part of that!
- Javier Casares shared a very interesting plugin. One that solves the problem of having lots of images in the WordPress Media Library, but you know not all of them are used anymore. This plugin will allow you to get rid of them!
- Mark Wilkinson shared his frustrations about anonymous PHP functions being difficult to unhook when you want/need to. It sparked an interesting conversation.
IMO they should only be used if for functions that should never need to be unhooked, but yeah, they’re a bit of pain. There are ways, though.
- WordPress VIP, WeGlot and Inpsyde are organizing a webinar to discuss solutions-based approaches to Multilinguality on WordPress this October 25, 2023. Highly recommend you check it out if you’re building multilingual sites! It’s free!
🚀 Performance
- Przemek published an article that’s near and dear to my heart. It’s about making architectural choices in how you write performant code.
We need more of these kinds of tutorials! We’re talking shaving off milliseconds here, but at a scale, these milliseconds matter! We should want to be always be optimizing before we think hardware (specs) and software (caching solutions) as the solution for optimizations.
Like many other things in developing sites and code, performance should never be an afterthought.
- WP Rocket published an article where they did a speed comparison between Elementor and WPBakery.
It’s nice to see how they measure things, but it’s also missing a huge component. And that’s a highly non-optimized site to begin with. Which is what I see all the time in my Performance Scans. Anyway, let me know what you think and if you think the results are surprising or not.
- Not only is our soon-to-be default WordPress theme, Twenty Twenty-Four, a pretty one, it’s got loads of extra features. And knowing this, it’s pretty amazing how fast they’ve been able to make the theme so far.
My favorite performance optimizing tools in WordPress:
- The best Front-end optimization plugin
- Cleaning up WordPress + script manager
- Cloud based performance optimizations
🔆 Inside WordPress Highlight
- Seems like it’s the season for WordPress awards, and here’s another one for you. But this is a different kind. You’re guaranteed to win this one 🎉, AND you’ll be raising money for the WP Community Collective. It’s a win-win! Organized by my good friend Nathan of WP Builds. How neat is 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’ve been using something similar for Wikipedia for ages, but I needed this for LinkedIn more than I realized
- Did you know that a <picture> tag lets you choose a different image source for dark mode? Well, you can!
📖 What I am reading
I am of the opinion any and all governments should be radically transparent and use open source solutions wherever they can. In that light, it was nice to discover the EU has built open-source software to automate the inspection of websites to collect evidence of personal data processing, such as cookies, or requests to third parties.
That’s it for this week’s edition of Inside WordPress. Thanks for reading!
Best, Remkus
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