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Get Ready for WordPress 6.8, Contributor Sprints + Future Tools in WordPress

Read on: my website​

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Hi Reader 👋🏻,

As we're inching closer to WordPress 6.8 being released with the first Release Candidate published, it's good to start acquainting yourself with all the new and updated things 6.8 is going to ship with.

And I've listed them all below.

Hope you enjoy it!

Get in front of 1825+ dedicated WordPress friends and check out my sponsoring options and reach out to me if you think we can be a good fit!

🗞️ Within WordPress News

Here’s what I saw happening this past week:

• Selfishly, I'm listing my blog post first about how I think Hackathons compare to a WordCamp Contributors Day, and what I think introducing a Contributor Sprints is the way to go. And the people in the comments seem to agree in various ways!

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• The WordPress 6.8 Field Guide was published this week. This guide outlines major developer features and breaking changes in 6.8 and is published in the Release Candidate phase to help inform WordPress extending developers, Core developers, and others.

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• With the Field Guide, there's a ton of WordPress 6.8 Dev Notes published as well. Have a look:
  • ​Accessibility Improvements in WordPress 6.8​
  • ​Miscellaneous Block Editor Changes in WordPress 6.8​
  • ​Updates to user-interface components in WordPress 6.8​
  • ​Interactivity API best practices in 6.8​
  • ​New filter should_load_block_assets_on_demand in 6.8​
  • ​Changes to the .screen-reader-text class in WordPress 6.8​
  • ​More efficient block type registration in 6.8​
  • ​Data: A helpful performance warning for developers in the ‘useSelect’ hook​
  • ​Roster of design tools per block (WordPress 6.8 edition)​

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• WordPress 6.8 comes with a few new best practices and requirements in the Interactivity API that are part of a longer-term continuous-improvement effort. Some of the relevant changes in 6.8 are an intermediary step: They do not include these enhancements themselves, but they prepare the project to add them in a future release by adding two new deprecation warnings. Interactivity API best practices in 6.8.

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• WordPress 6.8, the Source of Truth, was published on the Gutenberg Times as well.

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• Here's the last WordPress 6.8 related item for this edition, and it's a nice little nugget: New REST API Filter for Exposing Menus Publicly in WordPress 6.8.

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• WP Engine’s annual conference is expanding its content to be more inclusive of the developers, agencies, marketers, and brands that are building the future of the web, and DE{CODE} 2025 registration is open!

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• Perfmatters, one of my favorite Performance related tools (scroll down for a small list of what those are) did a big release this week. With version 2.4.x being a major performance update. For instance, it's now cutting script size by over 15% (32% uncompressed), on top of the 8% reduction they did in v2.3.7. Perfmatters also added built-in JS deferral exclusions for Cloudflare Turnstile.

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• Brian Coords built a system for flexible WordPress Playground blueprints using Cloudflare Workers to help him spin up demo WooCommerce stores.

Man, I love these kinds of solutions, because in case you didn't know yet, Cloudflare workers are the 💣.

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• Sometimes you see a redirect on a WordPress site, and you don’t know what is causing it. Kaspars Dambis from WP Elevator shared ways to determine the source of any redirect.

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• ‪Eric Karkovack‬ shared a great article on Speckyboy on how you shouldn't try to build all the things at once. And why a modular approach is better for WordPress development.

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🙏🏻 Community Sponsors

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Please check out our wonderful Community Sponsors' offering ☝

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🚀 Performance & Security

• 📺 If you feel like there are too many undiscovered features being shipped in Chrome's DevTools, this video's got you covered to at least catch up on the last 3 major builds.
• Jonny Harris published his blog post on optimizing WP_User_Query Performance: Lazy Loading, Query Caching, and Memory Efficiency in WordPress. Can we have more of these posts, Jonny? 😁

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• Patchstack released Q1 2025’s Most Exploited WordPress Vulnerabilities.

My favorite Performance Optimizing tools in WordPress: NitroPack: Cloud based performance optimizations​ Perfmatters: Clean up Scripts, and optimize WordPress​ WP Rocket: The best Front-end optimization plugin​ ​Code Profiler for WordPress​

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🔆 Within WordPress Highlight

Post Status Individual Membership are now $50/year. As they work to make updates to the site and their forms, you can use code 'poststatus50' for the new pricing.

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Some of my favorite WordPress tools: My two favorite forms for WordPress: Gravity Forms and WS Form​ These are the themes I use: Ollie, Rockbase and GeneratePress​ And, obviously, Scanfully for all my Site Health & Performance monitoring

🎁 Bonus

🎙️ This week we've got two podcasts published on the Within WordPress Podcast. Both are very much about the future of WordPress.

The first one is with Kevin Geary, and he turned me into a believer:

and the second one is with Milana Cap​

Hope you enjoy both conversations. I think there's so much to learn from both episodes.

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

Best,
Remkus

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Remkus de Vries – Within WordPress
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