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Woo Test Orders, 5 Thought Pieces + Jono's Predictions

Hi Reader 👋🏻,

With the State of the Word just around the corner, we're closing in on the end of a very tumultuous year for WordPress. It's in that light that I've combined 4, 5 resources into one for this week's Within WordPress highlight.

That said, there's plenty of cool new tools and finds I love sharing with you this week. Hope you enjoy it!

🗞️ Within WordPress News

Here’s what I saw happening this past week:

• Turns out that there appears to be some back and forth about the items in the list I referenced in last week's edition with regard to new WooCommerce features being brought into WooCommerce Core. James Kemp cleared up some things in a reply to Katie Keith's statement:

James Kemp @jamesckemp @KatieKeithBarn2 I don't know who contacted Robert, but we haven't confirmed which plugins are going to be in core yet - there was some discussion and suggestions that were made previously, but part of my new role will involve planning the roadmap for "more in core"; that hasn't been done yet. Katie Keith @KatieKeithBarn2 I hope that’s not the real list because it could kill 2 of my plugins which have combined revenue of $163k/year 😰 It’s important for WooCommerce to be a leading ecommerce platform, but blurring the lines between core and plugin territory does make it harder to build a secure… https://x.com/i/web/status/1865314601463697748 https://twitter.com/deviorobert/status/1863440598235029588 11:58 AM • Dec 8, 2024 0 Retweets 7 Likes Read 2 replies

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With Brent MacKinnon adding to that by saying "It's not a real list". In case you didn't know, James is Core Product Manager for WooCommerce and Brent is Product Marketing & Developer Experience at WooCommerce.

What is clear is that WooCommerce is evolving and Woo is bringing in essential commerce features into core–to create a more powerful platform. And Woo is sharing A LOT more about where they're going in 2025, which I applaud and love as a new direction.

• Robert DeVore's releases that caught my eye this last week:
  • ​A maintenance mode plugin that's lightweight, bloat-free, and powered by the WordPress Block Editor 😍
  • ​Associated Taxonomies, a plugin designed to streamline taxonomy management by enabling you to associate terms within the same taxonomy.
  • And the third one, my absolute favorite, is of Test Orders for WooCommerce. It is designed to simplify testing workflows for WooCommerce store owners. This plugin adds a “Test Order” payment gateway to your store, allowing you to place test orders without processing actual payments. Super neat!

👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻

• ​Constant Commits is a file change monitoring system with automatic commits. Specially designed to back up changes during development with AI tools. That's what Javi Guembe released and it's kinda neat!

• John Blackbourn started curating a list of resources related to the security of GitHub Actions workflows. It's new and it's in progress, but hopefully it will become a valuable resource for developers and teams who use GitHub Actions.

• What if you find yourself putting time and effort into creating a robots.txt file only to find out bots are ignoring it? Well, Cloudflare now helps you enforcing your robots.txt rules!

• My friend Luc Princen made a little script that turns FSE patterns into loadable template files, so they can then easily be added to Git. This saves from having to go through a lot of database hassle. He's published it in a gist.

It's a good thing to add to Brian Coord's version control suggestions here for FSE.

• ​Dynamic Template Parts is a newly released plugin by Matt Watson that lets you swap headers, footers, and other template parts dynamically based on the content you're editing. Pretty neat!

Came across two other interesting block related tools you might want to check out. One is WP Interactions, and the other is as site builder with Blocks called Blockera.

• More than 550 WordPress plugins have already set up a vulnerability disclosure program with Patchstack. They provide a secure channel for vulnerability reporting and help plugin authors to validate and organise all reports for free! If you're building on WordPress, you should join their program!

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🚀 Performance & Security

• Most people agree that Core Web Vitals are important at this point, but optimizing CWV on ad-heavy sites is a bit of a white whale. Ryan Sullivan published a piece about how the SiteCare team approaches Core Web Vitals optimization on sites with lots of ads.

• Jono Alderson, no wait... let me try that again. The illustrious and brilliant Jono Alderson has been predicting all kinds of things for 2024 in his newsletters. Sistrix posted a recap of all of them. You'll want to read them. Trust me.

He may or may not have paid me to say this, btw 🤷🏼

🔆 Within WordPress Highlight

Because we're closing in on 2025, it's good to start looking into what lies ahead for WordPress. In that light, I'd like to highlight a couple of thought pieces that were published in the past week:

• It's clear for anyone paying attention that WordPress is facing challenges. I'm mostly referring to the "What is WordPress", and "What should WordPress do" part of the existing challenges. Joost de Valk did a great presentation at WordCamp Netherlands which he's largely turned into a blog post you should read. Read, and then use it to form an opinion on.
• Just like you should read Hendrik Luehrsen’s article called “WordPress isn’t WordPress anymore“.
• And, once you've processed those two, read Fränk Klein's article about The Challenges and Opportunities for WordPress Professionals in 2025​
• And lastly, Mario Peshev comments on where we're at.

Related, I am very curious to see what's being talked about at the State of the Word in Japan this coming Monday.

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💡 Interesting Finds

• ​The Privacy Chapter of the HTTP Archive Web Almanac is a great read. In case you weren't aware, The Web Almanac is an annual state of the web report combining the expertise of the web community with the data and trends of the HTTP Archive.
• Did you know you can append _pretty=true to any WordPress REST API request, and the server will return a pretty printed JSON response. This is handy if you want to inspect requests in the browser. Thank you, Georgi Mamadashvili for this neat trick!
• 📺 Wes Bos shared how one of the biggest problems with UI development is about to be solved! Customizable <select> brings allows us to </select>create totally custom dropdowns with HTML and CSS. Accessible, gracefully degrades and requires no JS!
• This looks impressive: grid.layoutit.com is a CSS grid layout generator tool.

❓Question of the Week

If you find yourself clicking "Something else", please comment here on X, BlueSky, Mastodon or LinkedIn 😅

🎁 Bonus

🎙️ The next episode of the Within WordPress podcast has been published this week and it's with Rytis Lauris, co-founder and CEO of Omnisend. One of the coolest and smartest marketing related tools to add to your WooCommerce stores. Join us in a super fun conversation with plenty of learnings for everyone. Promise!

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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