№ 144

DataStore Caching, HTML changes for 2025, Woo 9.6 & More

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Hi Reader 👋🏻,

It seemed quieter on the socials this past week. I guess this means everybody's nose down and focussing on setting 2025 up to be the best year ever. Right? I mean, I sure am with everything I've got going on.

And that's a lot. That said, I still managed to collect a bunch of interesting WordPress tools, WooCommerce things and other stuff. Lots to learn, as always. Let's jump in, shall we?

🗞️ Within WordPress News

Here’s what I saw happening this past week:

• Trust is important. Not just in the world of WordPress, with for instance plugins, but also with WordPress Core, the software. Kaspars Dambis wrote about package signatures and how they can ensure that the code you’re running is signed by the vendors you trust. Learn which two fundamental items this involves.

• In December, I highlighted Felix Arntz' AI Services as a Within WordPress Highlight. That plugin is now available as version 0.4.0, including a new major feature: The AI Playground. It allows you to explore the available AI services and their capabilities through a dedicated UI.

📺 Felix did an excellent video walkthrough of it. If you're integrating AI into your WordPress site, you need to check it out.

• Robert DeVore has released another plugin for WooCommerce last week. This one's all about how to make sure Woo's tracking is fully turned off.

• Mentioning Robert only once is impossible this time of the year, so here's the second mention: Control how AI crawlers interact with your WordPress site. Block 75+ known AI bots with a simple plugin that integrates right into your dashboard.

• My friend Taeke Reijenga published an article on Accessibility I think you all should read. It's about how improving accessibility can boost your SEO strategy and help you reach a wider audience. Discover practical tips and tools to optimize your site.

🛒 WooCommerce News

• WooCommerce is planning to introduce fulfillments into WooCommerce core, and they want to know how it can best serve you. Check out the article on the Woo development site for designs and other details.

• ​Order DataStore Caching is coming to WooCommerce. This experimental feature moves raw order data caching to the HPOS layer for improved performance.

Now, this is what I love seeing developed inside of Woo. HPOS all the things, if you ask me.

• Here's another one for all of you that build and develop on top of WooCommerce. The upcoming WooCommerce 9.6 version introduces changes to the default behavior of "Coming Soon" mode for new installations.

• WooCommerce 9.6 also introduces a filter to modify cart item images in Cart and Checkout Blocks via the Store API response. Allowing for a lot more flexibility on how a Cart looks.

• Last one Woo: WooCommerce 9.6 changes how checkout field visibility settings are saved. They'll now apply globally instead of to individual checkout block instances.

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🚀 Performance & Security

• We often think an unused plugin can do no harm. But you'd be wrong to think that, Reader. Learn why you should remove unused WordPress plugins.

• Tsvetan Stoychev shares that Web Performance Optimization (WPO) is now taught at Salzburg University, where he’ll lecture on Real User Monitoring (RUM).

• ​Speculative loading, or navigation speculation, is the concept of predicting (speculating about) which page a user might visit next and doing some or all of the work to load that page before they visit it. Learn more about Speculative loading and the Speculation Rules API by Quynh-Chi Nguyen.

🔆 Within WordPress Highlight

This week's highlight is one of those wonderful nice plugins I stumble upon, every now and then. So when you take the time to record and email that perfect video walkthrough to a client, it’s viewed once or twice at the most.

Then, a few weeks later, you find yourself explaining the exact same issue that the video was supposed to put to bed because no one saves or remembers email.

With Vloomp for Loom & WordPress, you can save your Loom videos where your clients can always find them: inside the WordPress dashboard.

💡 Interesting Finds

• ​Fascinating thread on X about how to create a web app and turn that into an app you can download from the App Store.
• Here's one for all you hackers out there: Track Bluetooth devices with Apple's Find My network.
• ​How AI is unlocking ancient texts — and could, nay, will rewrite history
• Relatively new things You should know about HTML heading into 2025 from Chris Coyier​

🔎 Scanfully Updates

We have Uptime Monitoring, SSL Certificate checks, Site Health in one place, Performance Monitoring, and a WordPress Activity Log inside Scanfully right now. But Barry and I are nowhere near being close to what we want to see inside of Scanfully's Dashboard.

This week, we sat down and plotted the next two big releases and let me tell you, it's going to be big! We've got such great features lined up that will do honor to our name. First up are Priority Pages!

We will scan fully! Jump in right now.

🎁 Bonus

When reading code, you put things like values of variables, control flow logic and call sequences into your head. The average person can hold roughly four such chunks in working memory. Once the cognitive load reaches this threshold, it becomes much harder to understand things.

​Cognitive load is what matters. It's why I block everything whenever I need a deep flow state.

That’s it for this week’s edition of Within WordPress. Thanks for reading!

Best,
Remkus

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Tjongervallei 10, Oudehorne, Fryslân 8413 CS
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