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Meet the Hackathon Winner, ActivityPub Expands + WordPress 6.8 Resources

Hi Reader 👋🏻,

The CloudFest Hackathon, The WP Day, and CloudFest in general was a lot of fun this past week(end). If you've never been, I highly recommend it for next year. Or perhaps, if you're based in the Americas, the US-based version might be worth your consideration to visit.

As should you be considering PressConf, btw. Just book already!

WordPress, as you probably have already gathered by now, is moving slow. We're at the 6.8 beta 3 now, and there's a possibility we'll not see any 6.9 action at all this year. More on that later in this newsletter.

Don't let the "gathering of news for 6 days instead of 7" fool you, we have a full newsletter this week!

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:

• We have a new "What’s new for developers?" resource. March 2025 edition.

• Unleash your WordPress child theme’s secret style potential! Seamlessly override styles with copied block CSS or enhance them with custom styles, no core tweaks required. Read Silvan Hagen’s blog post about how to do that.

• As I was alluding to in the intro, we might see less major releases for WordPress. A message, shared in the Core Committers Slack workspace by Matt Mullenweg, extended an invitation to core committers for a Zoom meeting. The agenda is to deliberate on the possibility of launching just WordPress 6.8 in 2025, postponing 6.9 to 2026, and setting back version 7.0’s debut to late 2027.

• Switch to better email & SMS marketing with Omnisend. Get the top-rated email marketing platform to convert & keep more customers. Get started today!

• Open source isn’t just code, it’s a lifeline. Robert DeVore went from building a niche WordPress plugin to launching AI-powered tools, all thanks to the open-source community. His story proves why giving back pays off.

Robert also released Slop Stopper: A free content checker for WordPress.

• Internet professionals agree: tearing down barriers to online info and tools is key. It’s not just ethical, it’s smart business. But the big question remains: whose responsibility is it to make websites accessible, you or your client?

• 📺 Kyle Van Deusen shared a video where he demonstrates that with just a couple lines of CSS, and absolutely no JavaScript, you can create some really neat page transitions that give your website a more "app-like" feel.

• Konstantin Obenland shared that ActivityPub 5.5.0 for WordPress is here! This update brings a ton of improvements, including a first step toward supporting Moves from Mastodon to WordPress. The Moves feature is about using Mastodon’s Move feature to move your followers to your WordPress user and continue posting from there.

Big things are ahead for this plugin! If only all of social media followed suit in adopting the ActivityPub protocol.

• While we're on the topic of ActivityPub, the Fediverse topic is never far away, is it? During the CloudFest Hackathon, Matthias Pfefferle, Konstantin Obenland, and others had three days to work on Federated WordPress Events.

• WordPress 6.8 takes two more steps to modernize to the .screen-reader-text class in WordPress 6.8: it removes the clip property and the prefixed -webkit-clip-path property. Worth noting, this change applies to the CSS class used in the WordPress admin pages and across all bundled themes.

• WordPress 6.8 introduces a new function wp_register_block_types_from_metadata_collection(), which allows plugins to register multiple block types with a single function call. Good to see a more efficient block type registration coming in 6.8 Not that it will stop me from using ACF as a default for this, but you know 😏.

• Seriously Bud?! You let me talk into your mic for almost an hour? Seriously?! I guess he thought it was a good idea 😅

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🚀 Performance & Security

• Did you know that relying solely on a CDN-first approach is no longer a guaranteed performance boost? Evolving web technologies and strategies have rendered this once-essential practice almost obsolete.
• Netflix revamped its data storage game, ditching Apache Cassandra to tackle scalability woes. They streamlined data into Full Title Plays, Video Previews, and Language Preferences, efficiently sharding by type and age. ​Super cool deep dive.
• Attackers exploit CSS to create stealthy phishing messages that hide text and track users, raising security concerns. CSS's growing power is being misused, it was just a matter of time, wasn't it?

🔆 Within WordPress Highlight

Infographics are everywhere, but they’re practically invisible to millions of users with visual or cognitive impairments. Normally, making them accessible takes 1–1.5 hours of semantic HTML work.

Now? Just two clicks.

Meet Visua11y, a WordPress plugin born at the CloudFest Hackathon (which they won, btw!). It transforms static infographics into screen reader-friendly, editable content using Core Blocks, right inside the block editor. No hacks, no workarounds. Just accessibility done right.

Even better? The docs are open, so other CMSs can build their own version.

​Accessibility just leveled up!

💡 Interesting Finds

• I can't begin to express how cool this is. Cloudflare, trapping misbehaving bots in an AI Labyrinth 😍​
• Unlock the secrets of styling counters, from simple HTML list tweaks to advanced techniques that transform any element into a list-like masterpiece.
• Super cool tool to enhance and upscale your images using AI, right in your browser​.
• I'm using Tailwind sparsely, but for those of you that use it all the time, this is a great resource: Tailwind Gradient Generator.
• I quite like what you can do with underlines in CSS nowadays.

🔎 Scanfully Updates

We’re using PostgreSQL for our databases for Scanfully. If you’re working with WordPress, you might think MySQL is all you need, but there are plenty of scenarios where (and additional) PostgreSQL makes sense.

Anyway, I’m sharing this here for Barry, my co-founder, but perhaps these 11 PostgreSQL patterns that might change your mind in how to use PostgreSQL. From smarter keys to rock-solid constraints. Go and see why devs swear by it​

🎁 Bonus

🎙️ GenerateBlocks, part of the GeneratePress family, is a wonderful tool set built to extend the Block Editor. Really smartly built. Ian Svoboda is mostly responsible for building out that functionality, and I sat down with him to talk about the challenges he ran into:

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
Tjongervallei 10, Oudehorne, Fryslân 8413 CS
The Netherlands

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