Previews, Less DB stress & A Webinar

This has probably been the most busy week of the year, yet. It’s one of those weeks where I was not Lord and Master of my calendar. But… of course that didn’t stop me from collecting lots of interesting things for this week’s edition of Inside WordPress.

(And thanks all for the nice positive feedback about the new format and logo!)

Hope you enjoy this edition!

Today’s edition of Inside WordPress is sponsored by NitroPack

It’s webinar time again! NitroPack’s is hosting their third webinar with Google and this time, the will focus on the hardest Core Web Vital – Largest Contentful Paint. Almost half of all websites aren’t passing this as well as they should, so you want to make sure you follow this one for actionable optimization strategies to boost your Core Web Vitals. Secure your seat now. It’s free!

🗞️ Inside WordPress News

Here’s what I saw happening this past week:

Yesterday, all of the sudden there was a Live Preview button added to a plugin listing in the WordPress repo. Clicking on it launched a WordPress Playground instance with just that plugin active. Today, that was reverted. As it should’ve been.

This needs to be opt-in as there are too many options where having this makes zero sense. Personally, I think plugin developers should be able to control what they want to use for the demo of their product. Whether that’s an InstaWP link or their own thing.

This is where you can let you voice be heard with what we want to do there.

Patrick Posner released a new web tool, a service that turns your dynamic WordPress site into a static version. It’s called Web to Zip.

I’ve already played with it and it’s a great way to move old stale WordPress site you’re running into static version. And upload them to Cloudflare Pages, for instance.

Gabriel Rose, a Lead FE Engineer at 10up released very useful VS Code extension that provides autocomplete for your WordPress theme.json tokens in your CSS. Nifty!

Mark Wilkinson asked a great question on X. He asked why the update in the use of Block Themes is extremely slow. And Derek Ashauer answered it perfectly. I think he’s absolutely spot on.

How can you use the WordPress Search Block and have it search based only a specific post type? Check out Mark Wilkinson’s excellent write-up as well as Georgi Mamadashvili’s answer.

WebDevStudios introduced wd_s version 4. It’s a hybrid theme between a classic WordPress theme and a FSE theme.

🚀 Performance

Prevent unnecessary network requests with the HTTP Cache.

It’s an older article from 3 years back, but still valid AF.

Johnny Harris got one cool improvement into WordPress 6.4. If you are using persistent object caching, WP_Query will now be loading the post objects from the object cache. The database loading from cache is faster than database and will take stress off the database server.

My favorite performance optimizing tools in WordPress:

🔆 Inside WordPress Highlight

I mentioned InstaWP above, and I think it’s such a cool service that it deserves to be highlighted. For instance, Altis Accelerate, a plugin you should play more with can be played with in an already configured and installed version, powered by InstaWP. How neat is that? But yeah, definitely check (both) out.

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

If you’re a ChatGPT Plus member, you can now use Dall-E 3 right there in ChatGPT. If you’re curious what you can do with that, just check out this thread.
Silvan, again, shared something you all need to see. It’s something created by Stefan Velthuys called Charcopy. An easy way to get your special characters like ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

📖 What I am reading

I know I promised Cloudflare bits, but I couldn’t quite finish it in time. Something “about what’s in a barrel won’t turn sour” 😅. You’ll just have to wait a bit longer.

🎁 Bonus

My 🎙️ Within WordPress podcast saw another release publish. Edition 15 was with Lesly Sim of NewsletterGlue fame. An episode full of learnings, pivots, and insights!