Just this last Monday I attended WordCamp Whitley Bay in the UK. Besides reconnecting with old friends and making new friends, seeing a small WordCamp of about a 100 attendees was a nice experience again. Great reminder that WordCamps don’t have to be these behemoths of a couple of thousand attendees.
With driving back on Tuesday, yes I love roadtrips 😅, it’s been a short week, but I’ve got lots to mention.
Today’s Inside WordPress is sponsored by WS Form. WS Form is not just another form plugin for WordPress, but a powerhouse in possibilities what it allows you to achieve.
🗞️ Inside WordPress News
Here’s what I saw happening this past week:
- Twenty Twentythree is full in development and if you’d like to see how we’re finally getting an un-opinionated default WordPress theme again, you can already play with it with Playground.
Thanks Sarah for sharing that link!
- One of the oldest features inside WordPress is called Quick Edit. And it’s lovely to see it being improved upon actively again. I might have to start using it again!
- Convesio shared a very thorough overview of the history of WooCommerce. Like, there’s really a lot of information about its history from many different angles there.
I enjoyed this one a lot!
- Speaking of WooCommerce… They published an interesting tutorial on the WooCommerce Developer site about how to place an order using the Store API.
I think this is a sign, just like HPOS is, that WooCommerce is quickly becoming a faster and more solid platform to work on. Not just “on”, but also with with external tools. The future of WooCommerce is bright IMO.
- As soon as I saw this ticket I was kinda surprised this wasn’t already in place for the WordPress plugin repo pages.
🚀 Performance
- This one I missed, but a draft version of the Web Sustainability Guidelines (WSG) has been published.
This collective report team prioritizes the establishment and implementation of sustainability principles on the internet, with a particular emphasis on web performance. It should come as no surprise that a sustainable web is very closely connected to a fast web.
- WP Rocket released their 3.15 version. Very nice version as it adds the option to lazy load background images. Helping you with improving your LCP and FCP.
- Felix Arntz shared the results from the WordPress 6.3 performance analysis based on 100,000s of real WordPress sites, with amazing outcomes: The enhancements from 6.3 improved LCP by almost 6% at scale, and for some sites even by more than 20%. Read all about it on the Make WordPress site.
My favorite performance optimizing tools in WordPress:
- Best Front-end optimization plugin
- Cleaning up WordPress + script manager
- Cloud based performance optimizations
🔆 Inside WordPress Highlight
Mark Westguard of WS Form gave me a “quick” demonstration of WS Form, and I have to say, I was blown away with the potential here. It is truly avant-garde WordPress form plugin crafted for developers. It has huge number of templates and AI baked in. It’s the only form for WordPress to have a fully responsive lay-out editor, and a very robust debug console available in the market.
Doesn’t happen often, but I was blown away. Check out the Knowledge Base and you, too, will be amazed what you can build with this tool. Because, yes, it is a tool. It’s transcended above being “just another WordPress plugin”.
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
- Playing with CSS never gets boring. Especially when you play around with CSS Mask Animations. No clue what that is? Smashing Magazine’s got you covered. Excellent tutorial, as always.
- My buddy Nat shared a funny meme about what to (not) do when a client doesn’t pay their bill. In the comments, Igor mentioned a pretty cool solution for those types of situations.
📖 What I am reading
Didn’t have much time to read significant amount of pages, but I did read these two longer articles:
🎁 Bonus
🎙️ This week’s bonus is the podcast I recorded with Joshua Wold. We talked about the importance of proper onboarding new users to your WordPress plugins, themes, and really, any kind of solution that works with WordPress. Joshua offered lots of insights on where to focus your attention on. We finished with a great conversation on the WordPress Community as a whole.
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