This was a big week. If only for one simple fact: it’s been twenty years! Twenty years since Mike Little commented on Matt Mullenweg’s blog. A simple comment. Nothing more than letting Matt know that he would love to help out fork B2 into something new. Something that would become known to the world as WordPress.
I wonder if those two gents ever had any clue of the impact they would have on the world as we know it in the first couple of years.
I, for one, am beyond grateful for them kickstarting this movement. Thank you, Mike! Thank you, Matt! 🙏🏻
Let’s get to the rest of the news!
🗞 WordPress News
This was prompted by a tweet of mine that saw some nice engagement from some of the WordPress Core developers. This is one thing that’s always bugged me to bits; having 6, 8, or even 10 year old bugs in your software does not get the message of “your voice matters” across.
- The folks over at Advanced Custom Fields published a tutorial on how to use ACF’s Flexible Content. One of the many powerful applications of ACF.
I’ve been using it for years and I’m always amazed how few people are actually familiar with this functionality. Have you ever tried it?
- WooThumbs 5 was launched this week and it’s one of the nicest additions for WooCommerce’s native gallery function. James Kemp, mentions some serious performance gains with this release. And you know I’m all about them gains.
🚀 Performance
- The world of web performance is a very multi-faceted one. One of the areas that is often overlooked is CSS performance. Within the CSS file itself. I was reminded of this by a tweet from Mark Howells-Mead. It was a reference to a seven year old article by Harry Roberts of CSS Wizardry fame. In it, Harry explains in great detail why mixins are faster than using
@extend.
Very good read, and if nothing else, I hope it prompts you to think about how you can optimize your CSS files next time you’re building or refactoring CSS files.
💡 Interesting finds
- If you’re not liking what Twitter has done to it’s views, tabs over the last weeks… here’s a simple Chrome Extension that will make things slightly normal again.
🔆 WordPress Highlight
Connect your WordPress website to any external API. If you’ve been building WordPress sites, chances you have been doing exactly this. Now, you could be using NoCode solutions like Zapier for this, but there are also ways of doing this inside of WordPress. I came across this relatively new plugin called WPGetAPI that does this exactly, and like how it’s doing things.
Maybe you do too?
📖 What I am reading
For the last week I’ve been reading and re-reading this research journal on the Evolution of Beliefs in Social Networks. Very interesting read. Bit technical, research-heavy written text, but I’m sure you’ve found your way to ChatGPT by now. So feel free to have it create a more readable version for you, if you so desire 😉
🎁 Bonus
If you’re selling products, especially to a global audience, chances are you’re using some kind of platform to do this. As I’m building out my courses and ebooks, I’ve done some researching into what platform to use. I’ve landed on Lemon Squeezy.
That’s it for this week’s ramblings. Thanks for reading!
Best,
Remkus
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